Trump to Expand Travel Ban to Around 30 Countries After Shooting

The Trump administration is expected to expand its travel ban to include around 30 countries, a bid to more aggressively curtail migration to the US following last week’s shooting of two National Guard members in Washington.

A list of the countries being added to the ban is expected to come soon, according to a Department of Homeland Security official. The administration already has in place a full block on travelers from 12 countries, with partial restrictions on seven others.

President Donald Trump has threatened a number of actions to restrict migration to the US following the attack in Washington, which killed one Guard member and left another in critical condition. Federal authorities have identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, an Afghan national who worked with US forces and the CIA in Afghanistan before arriving in the US in 2021.

President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Dec. 2.

Photographer: Yuri Gripas/CNP/Bloomberg

Trump and allies have seized on the case, blaming the prior administration of Joe Biden for letting Lakanwal into the country and pushing for more curbs on migrants. In the days after the shooting, Trump outlined steps his administration planned to take, including halting admissions from certain developing nations, revoking citizenship for some naturalized migrants and ending federal benefits for non-citizens.

While the scope of many of those efforts and how the administration would implement them remain unclear, an expansion of the travel ban — one of the most controversial Trump policies dating back to his first term — would offer one of the most concrete steps yet from the president to follow through on his pledge to stem the flow of legal migration.

Trump’s first-term efforts to ban travelers from certain countries underwent numerous iterations and a prolonged court fight before being ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court as “squarely within the scope of Presidential authority.” Trump reinstated his travel ban earlier this year.

The plans for an expanded travel ban were first reported by CBS News.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday she met with Trump to recommend he expand the travel ban that is in place, but she did not elaborate on how many countries would be affected.

“I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she said in a post on X.

The countries currently facing a full ban include Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, with partial bans on travelers from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services has issued new guidance to consider among “significant negative factors” a country’s inclusion on the president’s travel ban, while the State Department has announced all visa issuances to Afghan nationals applying with an Afghan passport are paused until further notice, including Afghan Special Immigrant Visas.

Trump last week in a post on social media said he would move to “permanently” pause migration from “all Third World Countries.” But the president has been taking steps to overhaul US immigration policy well before the National Guard shooting, including severely lowering the refugee cap, ending temporary protected status for migrants from numerous countries, imposing a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas used for high-skilled workers, and revoking thousands of visas.

The administration also plans to review the cases of all refugees resettled under the Biden administration, according to an internal Nov. 21 memo seen by Bloomberg News. USCIS paused some green card applications as it looked to intensify its scrutiny of potential permanent residents, Bloomberg reported in March.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Hadriana Lowenkron in Washington at hlowenkron@bloomberg.net;
Myles Miller in New York at mmiller899@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Justin Sink at jsink1@bloomberg.net

Meghashyam Mali

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