The article “Draft List for New Travel Ban Proposes Trump Target 43 Countries” (The New York Times, 14 March 2025) writes about the Trump administration draft listing 43 countries—organized into three tiers—whose citizens may face restrictions to traveling to the United States. 7 Caribbean countries are on the lists.
According to journalists Charlie Savage and Ken Bensinger, it is not clear whether people with existing visas will be exempted from the ban, or if their visas will be canceled. “Nor is it clear,” they write, “whether the administration intends to exempt existing green card holders, who are already approved for lawful permanent residency.”
The new ban on travel has Cuba and Venezuela on the “red” list of 11 countries whose citizens would be flatly barred from entering the United States. The “orange” list of 10 countries whose citizens would be subjected to mandatory in-person interviews includes Haiti.
The draft also includes a “yellow” list of 22 countries that would be given 60 days to clear up “perceived deficiencies,” with the threat of being moved onto one of the other lists if they did not comply. That list includes Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Lucia. The perceived deficiencies may include “failing to share with the United States information about incoming travelers, purportedly inadequate security practices for issuing passports, or the selling of citizenship to people from banned countries.”
[. . .] The Trump administration’s overall reason for re-drafting these bans is ostensibly “to protect American citizens from ‘aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten [our] national security, espouse hateful ideology or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.’”
For those who do not see a clear connection between the lists of countries and the purported wrongdoings, you are not alone… Lack of clarity seems to be purposeful and strategic. Or is it?
Read the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/us/politics/trump-travel-ban.html