WASHINGTON − President Donald Trump has launched a sweeping crackdown on legal entry into the U.S. through a revived travel ban, as his administration takes dramatic steps to block millions of people from taking up temporary or permanent residency.
Trump’s extensive effort to keep visitors from nearly two dozen countries out of the U.S. had led the administration to block most travel from places including Haiti and Somalia, revoke temporary protected immigration status for hundreds of thousands of people from nations trapped in conflict, clamp down on student visas − and all but cease refugee admissions.
An unconventional approach melding immigration reforms and national security policy has resulted in the most dramatic restructuring of admissions policy in a generation, with the second Trump administration taking full advantage of a rare do-over in government.
President Trump bans travel from 12 nations, partially restricts entry from seven others
Trump expands first term policies to target new countries
The Supreme Court in 2018 gave Trump permission to keep out foreign nationals whose presence the administration says would be detrimental to U.S. interests. Trump reinstituted and expanded a program last week that puts full or partial restrictions on travel to America from the citizens of 19 nations, with notable exceptions.
Citizens of 12 countries were completely banned from entry beginning on June 9: Afghanistan, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Visitors from another nine countries, including Cuba and Venezuela, were hit with partial immigration and travel bans.
More: LA, Olympic officials have ‘every confidence’ travel ban won’t disrupt 2028 Games
Athletes, relatives and coaches traveling for sporting events like the 2026 World Cup and the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028 were exempted. So were immediate family members of some existing visa holders, Afghan nationals who were employed by the U.S. and ethnic and religious minorities facing persecution in Iran.
Trump’s administration also said Chinese students connected to China’s communist party or studying in critical fields would no longer be welcome. And tried to stop international students from studying at Harvard.
A leaked State Department cable also revealed the administration may require prospective international students at other universities to undergo social media vetting. The administration has also taken steps to deport pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Trump crackdown on legal entry draws less attention
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that slammed America’s doors to new refugees, halting admissions from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq and other war-torn countries.
Trump moved to end temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Venezuelan nationals in February, and is not expected to renew TPS for an upcoming batch. His administration also declined to extend TPS for Afghans and rescinded an extension for 521,000 Haitians that had been approved by the Biden administration. Citizens of Cameroon, in West Africa, will lose the protections in June. Without an extension, Hondurans’ TPS will expire in July.
Supreme Court lets Trump revoke safe-haven program for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans
The administration also ended humanitarian parole for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuela immigrants, making them eligible for deportation.
Trump’s claw-back of temporary protected status for citizens of countries experiencing conflict − a program run through the Department of Homeland Security that former President Joe Biden greatly expanded − also removes work authorizations and deportation protections.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said Trump is pursuing the “same sort of anti-legal immigration push” he pursued in his first term, the refugee program was substantially curtailed.
“The areas that he has the clearest legal authority over are the ones that he is reducing,” Nowrasteh said.
While the number of refugees who come to America varies from year to year, 60,050 people were admitted in 2023, according to DHS.
Trump’s administration is only allowing refugees from one nation, white South Africans known as Afrikaners. He has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that they are the victims of genocide.
Stephen Miller, the president’s Homeland Security adviser, told reporters in May, as he sought to justify the policy, that the U.S. refugee program has historically been used as a solution to global poverty and it should not be.
“Wherever there’s global poverty or wherever there is dysfunctional governments, then the U.S. refugee program comes in, swoops them up, relocates them to America, and you have multi-generational problems,” Miller said. “The U.S. refugee program has been a catastrophic failure.”
Trump administration cites national security concerns
The administration has cited broad national security concerns for many of its actions while refusing to go into detail on individual cases.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters during a May 29 briefing that seemingly disparate actions such as Trump’s slashing of foreign aid, directives to universities and revisions to visas were all part of the administration’s pledge to get serious about security.
Bruce, who was being pressed to say how many Chinese students would be affected by new visa restrictions, stressed: “What the story is here is that the issue of being serious about safety for the country matters, and we’re going to look at that at every single front.”
Trump’s approach “perhaps has not been done before,” Bruce said in the remarks, which preceded Trump’s travel ban.
An analysis of State Department data by the American Immigration Council, which opposes Trump’s moves, found the policy could prevent 34,000 immigrant visas and more than 125,000 non-immigrant visas − typically for business and tourism − from being issued each year. The group’s analysis of 2022 data found that 298,600 people from affected countries came to the United States.
The countries included were identified by the Trump administration as nations “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient” to warrant a full or partial travel ban and those whose nationals “pose significant risks of overstaying their visas in the United States.” Of the countries on Trump’s list, Haiti had the most overstays in 2023, by far.
Stephanie Gee, the senior director for U.S. Legal Services at the International Refugee Assistance Project, a group that has taken Trump to court, criticized “very arbitrary exceptions” for people like athletes.
“I think it raises questions around that rationale that they’re picking and choosing how to say and when to say somebody is a national security threat,” she said.
Trump did not explain in his order why athletes were a lesser concern. But the Olympics allows athletes from all nations to participate, and Los Angeles is hosting in 2028.
Contributing: Erin Mansfield, USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump’s travel ban is here: What to know as U.S. shuts the door
