Kristi Noem helping with Trump travel ban. Here's what countries restrictions will affect
Trump ordered his administration to establish vetting and screening standards and procedures for entry into the U.S. and submit a list of countries that do not meet them by March 21. The order follows on a campaign pledge and an initiative from Trump's first day in office.
He also directed officials to identify and potentially remove nationals from earmarked countries who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.
The resulting actions could be more sweeping than the travel ban Trump put on seven majority-Muslim countries during his first term that led to chaos at airports and lawsuits alleging religious discrimination.
Trump issued multiple versions of the ban in 2017 until he landed on one that the Supreme Court upheld, and his most recent executive order directs members of his Cabinet to expand on what was in place when he exited office.
This time around, Trump went through a more rigorous process to implement his expected travel ban, calling for restrictions based on the level of information that countries collect and provide on international travelers. And he will benefit from an even more conservative Supreme Court when his executive actions face legal challenges.
A list of more than 40 countries whose citizens could be barred or limited from entry into the United States is reportedly under consideration. That list includes, Afghanistan, North Korea and even tiny Bhutan, a majority-Buddhist Himalayan nation.
The State Department declined on Thursday afternoon to comment on the deliberations.Trump said as a candidate that he'd reinstate his travel ban, citing a need to protect the country from 'radical Islamic terrorists.'
His Jan. 20 executive order called on Cabinet members to submit a report identifying countries 'for which vetting and screening is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension' of admission to the U.S.
The report should also identify 'how many nationals from those countries' have entered or been admitted to the United States since Jan. 20, 2021, the first day of former President Joe Biden's term.
Trump tasked four individuals with producing the report: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Trump administration appears to be structuring its second term ban differently than the first one, creating a three-tiered list of nations that do not provide the U.S. with the level of information it is seeking or are otherwise deemed by officials as a national security threat.
Countries on the 'red' list would see travel to the U.S. banned altogether, while countries on the middle, or 'orange' list would face visa restrictions. A lower tier of nations would be put on notice by the administration that they need to address problems.
Travel could be banned from 11 countries, according to the New York Times, which obtained a draft list of recommendations for the travel ban. Those are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
Trump previously banned travel from most of the countries on that list, with the exception of visa and green card holders. Bhutan and Cuba were not part of Trump's previous travel ban. The State Department lists Cuba as a state sponsor of terror.
Another 10 countries, including Russia and Belarus, would see visas sharply restricted. The remaining 22 countries, which includes many African nations, would have 60 days to address security concerns. They could ultimately be moved up on the list or completely left off, depending on their response.
Reuters reported on a similar memo. The list had not been finalized, the outlets cautioned, and may not have been approved yet by the secretary of state.
'Not all those countries will likely survive being on the list, because the staff is just looking at what they were told, what were their instructions, which were to ascertain and to evaluate each country,' said former acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf, the executive vice president of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 'But there's other decisions at play on whether a country gets a travel restriction or not.'
'There are other geopolitical issues,' Wolf added. 'That's why it goes to the secretary of State. That's why others will weigh in on those decisions.'
Based on what has been reported publicly, Wolf said it sounded like the administration plans to tell countries that until they increase their information sharing with the U.S. or provide certain data, they will have travel restrictions in place.
One factor the administration is likely to take into consideration is how frequently a country reports lost or stolen passport data to Interpol.
'What we found the first time around is a lot of countries just didn't report that in a timely manner,' said Wolf, who worked on Trump's earlier travel ban.
The State Department denied the existence of a list earlier in the week and said it did not create the memorandums that have been circulating.
'There is a review, as we know through the president's executive order, for us to look at the nature of what's going to help keep America safer, in dealing with the issue of visas and who's allowed into the country,' Tammy Bruce, the spokeswoman for the State Department, said Monday.
Unlike Trump's first iteration of a ban in 2017, which led to court challenges for discrimination against Muslims, the reported reincarnation does not focus solely on Muslim-majority countries. Bhutan, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela are being reportedly considered for outright bans but do not have Muslim majorities.
Travel ban for Bhutan? Citizens of tiny Bhutan, 'Land of the Thunder Dragon,' may end up on Trump travel ban list
A court blocked Trump's first travel ban, issued in January 2017, saying the order violated people's due process rights without sufficient national security justification. His administration replaced that with a second version in March 2017, which another court blocked. The Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of his travel ban that he signed in September 2017.
In its 2018 decision, the Supreme Court outlined a lengthy process that the government used to create the third travel ban, highlighted ways that certain foreign nationals can get exceptions to the travel ban, and argued the Trump administration was acting in 'legitimate national security interest.'
The process is similar to what Trump outlined in his Jan. 20 executive order. But critics have signaled they could challenge fresh aspects of the new administration's policies, including the attempts to retroactively apply visa restrictions to individuals who entered the country during the period Trump was not in office.
The International Refugee Assistance Program, one of the groups that sued in the first administration, said its next steps would depend on what is in the anticipated ban.
'Our team will be analyzing it as soon as it comes out to identify what those challenges might look like,' said Stephanie Gee, senior director of US legal services at IRAP.
'To the extent there are arguments to be made that the action is unlawful, there are a lot of organizations who will be looking to bring challenges.'
Trump already appears to implementing part of his executive order, which allows the secretary of Homeland Security to 'take immediate steps' to exclude or remove a foreign national from countries without proper vetting standards.
The order cites advocacy for 'foreign terrorist' groups and 'hostile attitudes' towards U.S. 'citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles' as reasons for visa rejection and possible removal.
The Trump administration this month deported a kidney doctor with work visa after she attempted to enter the country on a flight to Boston. The Department of Homeland Security said she had 'sympathetic photos and videos' to a leader of Hezbollah on her phone.
'A visa is a privilege not a right,' the department said on X. 'Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security."
'I'm a Shia Muslim," authorities say Dr. Rasha Alawieh said, according to the USA TODAY Network. "He's a religious figure. It has nothing to do with politics. It's all religious, spiritual things."
Federal authorities also arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist attending graduate school at the Colombia University. Khalil was in the U.S. legally.
After his arrest, Rubio said, 'We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.'
The State Department acknowledged Thursday that it was conducting a review of all visa programs, as mandated by Trump's order but declined to say whether it had made any formal recommendations or when they could go into effect.
The Trump administration's report recommending countries for a travel ban is due Friday, March 21.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's travel ban 2.0 is coming soon. Kristi Noem is helping
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Switzerland moves to strengthen its competitiveness after US tariffs
ZURICH (Reuters) -Switzerland is intensifying efforts to strengthen its attractiveness as a business location, its government said on Wednesday, after being hit with some of the highest U.S. tariffs worldwide. Efforts will focus on regulatory relief for Swiss companies, and new rules incurring high costs for businesses could be pushed back, the government said in a statement. U.S. President Donald Trump this month imposed U.S. import tariffs of 39% on Swiss goods, though pharmaceuticals and some other sectors have so far been spared the duties. "(The government) wants to decisively press ahead with its economic policy agenda and is focusing on reducing the regulatory burden on companies," the government said. Geographical diversification and Swiss companies' access to alternative international markets should also be strengthened, the statement said. The new U.S. levies currently affect around 10% of Swiss goods exports, and could have potentially severe consequences for some companies, the government said. Switzerland does not anticipate a recession akin to the global financial crisis or the pandemic, it added. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Vox
20 minutes ago
- Vox
How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don't
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Attendees look on during Turning Point USA's Culture War event at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on October 29, 2019. Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images Last week, two young liberals asked for help finding a job in the ideas industry. And I didn't have a great answer. It made sense that they were asking: We were at a conference for liberals, dedicated to building a version of the doctrine that works in the 21st century. They were interested in studying ideas professionally, and I was there to moderate a panel about political philosophy. Yet I found myself struggling to give good advice. Sure, they could try for an internship at a liberal publication or think tank, but those are fiercely competitive and don't pay much. They could apply for a PhD program, but teaching jobs were scarce even before President Donald Trump took a hammer to American academia. What's really missing are programs of a specific kind — ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People. If my young acquaintances were right-wing, I might have told them to apply for National Review's Buckley and Rhodes journalism fellowships — multiyear paid opportunities to write for a national audience straight out of college. For a lesser commitment, they could have tried for the Claremont Institute's Publius Fellowship — a three-week program where you receive $1,500, a $700 travel stipend, free housing, paid meals, and an opportunity to study with some of the most influential (and radical) figures of the Trump era. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Those are two examples of numerous well-funded programs explicitly designed to usher as many bright young people into the institutional conservative world as possible. If you're an ambitious young college grad, and anywhere on the spectrum from libertarian to hardcore Trumpist, you've got tons of options to get into the ideas game. My young acquaintances really wanted a liberal version of such a thing. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to exist. Where there should be a talent pipeline from universities to liberal public intellectualism, there is a giant sucking sound instead. And, increasingly, it's giving the right a leg up in winning the future. The right's winning formula for training youth It is true, as conservatives have long alleged, that America's intellectual institutions are pretty left-leaning places. They often overstate the case — professors are more likely to be Elizabeth Warren Dems than 'globalize the intifada' socialist revolutionaries — but data confirms that liberals outnumber conservatives in academia and the media by pretty significant margins. This is, of course, not at all new. One of the founding texts of the postwar conservative movement, William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, is all about how academia is full of socialists who are chipping away at the eternal truths of capitalism and Christianity. Buckley founded National Review as an antidote to what he saw as the liberal tilt of the mainstream American press. The legacy of Buckley-style thinking is the rise of a conservative ideas industry. A young person nowadays could attend college at right-wing Hillsdale, build their law school life around membership in the Federalist Society, and then get a job writing right-wing papers for the Heritage Foundation — all while getting their news from Fox News and Mark Levin's radio show. As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. At the same time, the right also invested in the kinds of 'pipeline' programs our young liberals are desperate for. These aren't designed to replace traditional education or media institutions, but rather to identify young people interested in ideas and expose them to the right-wing alternatives. These work, in large part, by being intellectually exciting. It's not just that you get to go on all-expenses-paid trips with nice meals; it's that you are put in an environment where you're reading and debating classic works of political thought and literature with other people who share those interests. If you're the kind of nerd who wants to debate the finer points of Locke and Hamilton during undergrad summers, you're the kind of nerd who might one day be someone who matters in US politics — and the right's fellowships are there to help make sure you're mattering on their side. The people these young people are meeting are important and famous (well, DC famous). In a 2021 episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast, Nate Hochman — a radical young conservative writer who later staffed both Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Eric Schmitt — talks at length about 'the masterful things the conservative movement institutionally has done in terms of mentorship.' Hochman, who was raised in a liberal household and moved to the right in college, describes how the movement's fellowship programs brought him in direct and meaningful contact with conservatism's leading lights. 'All of a sudden, you're at dinner with people you've looked up to for years, staying up until 1 am drinking wine with them and asking them questions and getting to talk to them. And they're taking you seriously,' Hochman says. As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. When you stay up late drinking with someone, talking about shared ideas, you come to care about them in a way you don't if they sent you a cold email. When they come looking for help getting a job writing about conservative ideas, you'll work that much harder to place them in one. And the right has built its institutions to ensure that such positions are available. Right-wing publications and think tanks are much more open to debating big-picture questions — say, what kind of a nation is America? — than their left-wing peers (more on that in a second). Claremont, for example, was founded by students of conservative political philosopher Harry Jaffa, and it shows in the kind of work they put out (even when it strikes me as substantively ridiculous). Liberals are suffering from success There is no parallel culture in American liberalism — a function, in part, of liberalism's longtime intellectual dominance. There wasn't much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a PhD or an entry-level reporting job. However, these institutions were not avowedly liberal in character. They styled themselves as politically neutral, focused more on quality research and reporting, than as contributing to a particular ideological cause. This means that while liberals in such fields were in left-leaning environments, many were trained to see themselves primarily as professionals working a craft. So while there are plenty of internships available to young liberals, they're mostly focused on professional training (or coffee-fetching) rather than staying up late swapping ideas with big names. More broadly, the liberal professional approach also produced a kind of intellectual siloing. If you were a young liberal interested in political philosophy, odds are that you end up going to a PhD program and pursuing a career in academia. If you're interested in policy, odds are that you ended up studying a set of applied skills (like law or economics) that prepared you for very specific policy discussions in your area of expertise. But the conservative intellectual model bridges the philosophy-policy gap. It trains young people in the big-picture ideas, like conservative visions of political morality and religion, and teaches them to connect those things to everyday policy discussions. You aren't learning about abstract ideas or concrete policy, but rather learning a comprehensive worldview that treats policy issues as downstream of specific values. You are, in short, learning an ideology. Liberalism has plenty of brilliant theorists who work at a largely abstract level, and policy wonks who work on the most applied issues. But in the middle area of ideology, one bridging the gap between principle and policy, they've basically ceded the field to conservatism. The pipeline problem for young people is a symptom of the movement's blind spot: liberals, as a collective, don't care to cultivate a youth ideological cadre. This might not have been a problem in the past — and maybe even a benefit. Ideological thinking tends to produce rigidity, an unwillingness to adjust one's policy thinking based on new evidence. The right's longtime insistence that tax cuts can reduce deficits, or addiction to proposing military solutions to foreign policy problems, are two examples of curdled ideology. But we're at a moment where liberalism is in a particular kind of crisis: under threat from new ideologies that challenge not specific liberal policy ideas, but the basic premises of a liberal political system. Liberals need a new and compelling vision: one that explains why our ideas are not merely a defense of an unpopular status quo, but a broader politics that can be used to address cardinal problems of the 21st century. At this moment, liberals lack the personnel to articulate such a vision — while the right's radical thinkers, at places like Claremont, seize the field.
The Hill
21 minutes ago
- The Hill
Trump doesn't have to quit UNESCO again because we never lawfully rejoined
President Trump recently announced that the United States was quitting the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for the third time. This is good news – UNESCO has championed gender ideology in education, discriminatory DEI policies, and the entire litany of woke doctrines. It has also worked to erase Jewish history in the Holy Land. But the administration did not need to bother with formally withdrawing from the treaty — from a constitutional perspective, the U.S. hasn't been a member at least since Trump first quit it in 2017. When Biden sought to rejoin the Paris-based agency in 2023, he neglected to seek authorization from Congress. No one made a big deal of it then, but it means that, for domestic law purposes, the U.S. never actually rejoined. This is an important point with implications for numerous international organizations, especially as the administration sets out on an agenda of U.N. reform. Membership in international organizations was not supposed to be a political revolving door. Congress authorizes membership at the outset. After the U.S. leaves, a whole new congressional authorization must be obtained by any president wishing to rejoin. Under the Constitution, the president can only bring the country into a treaty with the 'consent' of two-thirds of the Senate. That is a substantial hurdle, and deliberately so: Commitments to foreign countries can be harder to pull out of than domestic ones. They can become a way of imposing obligations on the country that are then out of reach of the democratic process. In the 20th century, presidents have often relied on the approval of a majority of both Houses instead, a dubious practice but now widely followed. When the U.S. first joined UNESCO in 1946 (and the World Health Organization in 1948), President Truman was acting pursuant a law passed by both Houses authorizing him to do so. But Congress did not reauthorize Biden's reentry to UNESCO. Instead, he treated the 1946 authorization as a lifetime membership, when in fact it was only a one-time pass. If the U.S. quit a treaty that the Senate had ratified — say the NATO treaty — then a decision to rejoin would be subject to a new requirement of advice and consent. Congressional authorization is a stand-in for Senate ratification and should be subject to the same rules. Consider a parallel case: If a president fires a senate-confirmed appointee, and he or a subsequent president wishes to return him to the same post, no one would argue that he could do so simply on the grounds that the Senate had previously confirmed him. Indeed, Andrew Jackson's Attorney General resigned from his position, and was then reappointed to it — only to be rejected by the Senate. As a statutory matter, the 1946 agreement on UNESCO allowed the president to 'accept membership' — not accept, and accept, and accept again. If a congressional authorization is good for infinite rounds of quitting and rejoining, it makes getting out of international agreements harder than getting in – exactly the opposite of what the Framers intended. The argument of perpetual authorization was invented by Jimmy Carter, who purported to rejoin the International Labor Organization in 1980 based on a 1934 authorization. President Bush neglected to seek congressional approval when he rejoined UNESCO in 2002, nearly two decades after Reagan quit. Neither instance attracted much attention, and two modern actions do not prove a constitutional rule. There is a good argument for the Trump administration having withdrawn from UNESCO as if it were a member — to avoid any doubt or subsequent quibbling. But the administration should clarify that it is 'quitting' only out of an excess of caution, and does not see the U.S. as properly joined, which is consistent with its nonpayment of any dues. To avoid abuse by future administrations, Congress should repeal the antiquated authorizations for UNESCO and WHO, which Trump also announced withdrawal from. If a subsequent president wants to rejoin, he should have to sell it to Congress on the organization's existing records, not the hopes and dreams of the 1940s.
