Who’s Welcome (or Not) in U.S. Under Trump’s Travel Ban

When Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, one of his central campaign promises was to enact “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Shortly after he took office, he issued an executive order that was quickly dubbed the “travel ban,” triggering months of court cases and a series of amended orders. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump’s third version of the policy, issued through a presidential proclamation on Sept. 24, 2017, which made the U.S. off-limits to many or most residents of six countries, five of which are mostly Muslim.

Citizens of Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Yemen are generally barred from entering the U.S., whether they are seeking visas to visit temporarily or to immigrate. (Exceptions are made for students from Iran, Libya and Yemen.) The north African nation of Chad was the sixth nation on the original list but subsequently was dropped. The initial ban also restricted immigration, though not visits, by residents of Somalia. In January 2020, the Trump administration imposed similar immigration-specific restrictions to citizens of Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar.