Venezuela, Cuba, Togo… The Trump administration has suspended all immigration requests from 19 countries deemed high risk a few days after a fatal shooting in Washington involving an Afghan national, the US Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday.
The suspension applies to people from the twelve countries whose nationals have no longer had the right to travel to the United States since June and to nationals of seven other countries hit so far by restrictions in the issuance of visas, according to a memorandum from the immigration services consulted by AFP.
Seven new countries
Applications for “green cards” from nationals of the countries concerned, as well as applications for naturalization, are interrupted. The list includes some of the world’s poorest and most unstable countries.
Last June, Donald Trump ordered a ban on entry into the United States for nationals of Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The other seven countries concerned are Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
Homeland Security Minister Kristi Noem said Monday evening on “We don’t want them, not a single one of them,” she said.
On Tuesday, the American president launched into a violent diatribe against Somalia, saying that migrants from this African country should not be welcome in the United States. “I don’t want them in our country,” he said.
The fight against illegal immigration is Donald Trump’s top priority
Since the attack in Washington on November 26, attributed to an Afghan national, which cost the life of a National Guard soldier and seriously injured another soldier, the Trump administration has frozen any decision on the granting of asylum in the United States.
Donald Trump has made the fight against illegal immigration a top priority, speaking of an “invasion” of the United States by “criminals from abroad” and communicating extensively on expulsions of immigrants.
But its program of mass expulsions was thwarted or slowed down by multiple court decisions, notably on the grounds that the people targeted should be able to assert their rights.