Trump travel ban targets nations mired in civil wars or armed conflicts

Washington Post

12 hours ago

When President Donald Trump announced his new and expanded travel ban this week, the list of countries facing restrictions exhibited few obvious through lines. A closer look, though, reveals that many of the countries are united by a harsh recent history of civil war or armed conflict.
Of the 12 countries from which travel is fully restricted, three are embroiled in bloody civil wars: Yemen, Myanmar and Sudan.
Myanmar is considered among the most extreme conflicts in the world because of the number of armed groups involved in the civil war there, ranking behind only Gaza and the West Bank in an assessment by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a nonprofit analysis and crisis-mapping project. The country's military has faced an intense internal conflict since forcibly seizing power in 2021 and only controls about 21 percent of the country, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
ACLED lists Sudan as the eighth-most extreme conflict zone amid a ruinous civil war between the country's army and a rival paramilitary force. The fighting has led to more than 150,000 fatalities and a mass humanitarian crisis that numbers among the worst in the world.
Yemen, considered by ACLED to have high but not extreme levels of conflict, has been threatened by the presence of Houthi militants. The Trump administration re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization in early March.
These conflicts and others around the world have prompted mass migration from the violence and into neighboring countries or places deemed to be more stable — sometimes prompting political backlash aimed at refugees. In some cases, migrants don't have homes to return to or cannot return because of instability or the presence of a hostile regime.
Many of the remaining countries on the total-ban list — Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya and Somalia — are also undergoing conflicts of varying degrees of intensity.
In Haiti, the government is struggling to regain authority after gangs seized vast control of its capital, Port-au-Prince. Ten percent of the Haitian population has been displaced as a result of gang violence. Neighboring Dominican Republic implemented a plan in 2024 for mass deportations of Haitians back across the border.
Haiti's Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement Thursday that it was working to find a swift solution to the ban, given the consequences on Haitian families living inside and outside the country.
'This decision comes at a moment when the Haitian government is striving, with the help of its international partners, to fight the insecurity and to strengthen border security,' it said.
In Somalia, a fractious government emerging from a multi-decade legacy of civil war, is seeking assistance from international partners to fight against al-Shabab insurgents, who are global affiliates of al-Qaeda. The group, which previously led a fatal assault on a U.S. airfield in Kenya, has retaken crucial areas from Somali forces over the past three months.
Farther north in Africa, Libya is at risk of political instability over its oil fields, just five years out from a six-year civil war that broke the country in two.
In most cases, the White House cited visa overstays as the justification for putting countries on a full travel ban, including Muslim-majority nations such as Iran, Somalia and Yemen. While the overstay rate was high in some instances, the total number of visas issued was relatively small, The Washington Post reported. It was not immediately clear why some countries with higher overstay rates were left off.
A handful of countries impacted by the ban — including Cuba, Venezuela and Iran — were tied together by historically adversarial relationships with the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, referencing the confusion and turmoil that was suffered under the first Trump administration's travel ban.
'This brings back all the tragic stories … people who were unable to see a dying relative or the birth of a new child and had to attend weddings on Zoom,' Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, a U.S.-based advocacy group, previously told The Post.