Trump’s Entry Bans Aren’t Really About National Security

President Donald Trump’s proclamation blocking nationals of 19 countries from entering the United States is cloaked in the language of national security but is not tailored to further that goal. Instead, it seems calculated to bar populations the president has stigmatized or vocally vowed to exclude, including Muslims, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Africans.

The June 2025 ban applies to nearly all temporary visas, blocking tourists, business travelers, students, and scholars as well as many applicants for permanent residence, including relatives of U.S. citizens. The administration is reportedly considering banning nationals from an additional 36 countries, which would further impede legal immigration pathways.

Immigrants are often criticized for failing to “wait their turn” or “come the right way.” The people harmed by these bans — immigrants and their U.S. sponsors — are doing exactly that: gathering documents, undergoing background checks, and waiting, often for many years. But now, even if they have followed all the rules, they will still find the door slammed shut.

The government’s claim that the ban strengthens U.S. national security is belied by its own data. Although national security rhetoric may have intuitive appeal, none of the government’s three rationales — high overstay rates, insufficient screening and vetting systems, and refusal to accept deportees — hold up under scrutiny. By cherry-picking metrics to justify the ban, the administration seeks to vindicate an ugly policy of demographic exclusion that targets Muslims, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Africans.

First, the government has rigged its visa overstay metric so that nationals of countries with high numbers of overstays are not affected, whereas nationals of countries with very low numbers of overstays are banned. Second, the proclamation rests on the false premise that the United States relies on the security systems of the banned countries to disqualify certain travelers, but with its detailed screening criteria, a vast vetting apparatus, and high denial rates, the United States’ own security mechanisms are more than sufficient to identify and exclude individuals who could pose a threat. Third, the government’s data reveals that individuals from the banned countries are deported regularly from the United States, undermining the rationale that those countries won’t accept their citizens back.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in 2018 when the Supreme Court upheld the final iteration of the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban, the government once again has “failed in [its] attempts to launder the Proclamation of its discriminatory taint.”

The June 2025 proclamation banning nationals of 19 countries from entering the United States is much broader than the September 2017 ban upheld by the Supreme Court, which only targeted nationals from 8 countries. The proclamation can be understood as comprising three distinct entry bans based on the visa applicants it targets: students, tourists, and business travelers; applicants for permanent residence; and workers and fiancés of U.S. citizens. The affected countries are Afghanistan, Burma, Burundi, Chad, Cuba, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and Yemen.

First, individuals from all 19 countries are banned from entering the United States as students, tourists, or business travelers. This prohibition is already sending international students and U.S. universities scrambling and depriving hospitals of critical medical staff. It also imposes significant human costs, likely preventing family members from visiting sick or dying relatives, as happened to a Yemeni mother unable to see her terminally ill two-year-old, a U.S. citizen, in 2018.

Second, the proclamation also bans certain types of green card applicants from all 19 countries, including siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens; spouses and children of lawful permanent residents; abused, neglected, and abandoned children; and clergy and other religious workers.

The government approved nearly 34,000 immigrant visas in these categories from the targeted countries in fiscal year 2023. Because Congress limits the number of these visas granted annually, many now-banned individuals have already been waiting for several years to begin employment or reunite with family members in the United States.

In an apparent move to satisfy the favorable view of exemptions in the Supreme Court’s prior Muslim ban opinion, the spouses, parents, and minor children of U.S. citizens are exempted from the ban, although the proclamation demands “clear and convincing evidence of identity and family relationship (e.g., DNA).” Special immigrant visas, designated for Afghans who had served the U.S. government, are also nominally exempt, but the administration is shutting down their access to protection.

If the government proceeds with banning nationals from an additional 36 countries, it will reduce the number of the specified green card applicants from sub-Saharan Africa by more than 83 percent, an extraordinary barrier to immigration from the region.

The ban will affect people who have strong ties to American businesses and family members. It will hurt people like Mohamed Abdo, who entered the United States lawfully and is now a permanent resident, working as an engineer at a major airport. His fiancée cannot join him in Virginia because she is a Sudanese national, even though she fled Sudan and lives in Egypt, a country not listed in the proclamation.

Third, 12 of the countries also face a work and marriage ban. The proclamation blocks their nationals from seeking a temporary visa in a range of additional categories, above and beyond tourists and students, including fiancés of U.S. citizens, seasonal agricultural workers, and college-educated professionals.

The administration characterizes the other seven countries as subject to only a “partial” entry ban but provides no explanation for distinguishing between which countries are subject to the “full” or “partial” ban. “Partial” is a misleading description, however. Because nationals of the partially banned countries still face a full ban on personal travel, business travel, and study, 93 percent of those countries’ temporary visa applicants are still banned.

The proclamation provides three broad justifications for individual country bans, not all of which apply to each country: a high rate of visa overstays, screening and vetting limitations in the country of origin, and the nonacceptance of deportees.

U.S. law gives presidents the discretion to “suspend the entry” of foreign nationals when the entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” This authority was used selectively for decades, but following his campaign promise to institute “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” in January 2017 President Trump issued an entry ban against nearly all nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — all Muslim-majority countries. Though lower courts found early versions of the ban unconstitutional, a 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court held that a subsequent version was lawful because “the Government has set forth a sufficient national security justification to survive rational basis review.” Rational basis review requires only that a policy be plausibly related to the government’s stated objective.

A close analysis of the justifications in the new ban, however, demonstrates that they are not rational. The government’s own data shows that all three justifications are pretextual.

The Overstay Rationale

Sixteen of the nineteen countries included in the current entry ban are tagged with a new rationale not invoked in 2017. The 2025 proclamation provides: “Nationals of some countries also pose significant risks of overstaying their visas in the United States, which increases burdens on immigration and law enforcement components of the United States, and often exacerbates other risks related to national security and public safety.” Six of the countries — Burundi, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, and Turkmenistan — are listed in the proclamation with only this justification. If visa overstays were truly a serious concern underpinning the entry ban, however, both its design and the metrics used to justify which countries are included would be very different.

The first sign that this is a pretext is that the entry ban applies not only to temporary visa applicants but to applicants for permanent residence as well. Lawful permanent residents cannot overstay; their status is permanent.

Further, the proclamation’s overstay data is drawn from the 2023 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Entry/Exit Overstay Report using a methodology that the agency admitted can yield only rough estimates. CBP knows who enters the United States, but not necessarily who is allowed to remain here past the expiration of their original visa; some people will legally extend or change their status. For this reason, as the CBP report itself and others have discussed, the actual number of overstays is lower than the number it presents to the public.

Even so, the 19 banned countries together account for barely 10 percent of total estimated overstays. Why ban visitors and students from Burundi (with a mere 148 overstays in 2023) or Togo (397) but not the United Kingdom (16,170) or Canada (22,298)?

The answer is apparent from the data, and it is reminiscent of the administration’s bogus tariff formula: First, the architects of the proclamation sorted countries not by total overstays but by their estimated overstay rate, defined by CBP as the number of estimated overstays divided by the number of known departures within one fiscal year. Then they applied seemingly arbitrary cutoffs — 9.5 percent for temporary visitors and 15 percent for students — and put nearly every country above either of those cutoffs on the list for the June 2025 entry ban or anticipated bans. The countries with the highest numbers of overstays are for the most part not banned, while countries with very few are.

By tagging countries with a visitor visa overstay rate of 9.5 percent or higher, the administration sweeps in 40 countries for the current and anticipated entry bans, overwhelmingly in Africa. Lowering that threshold would have implicated Belarus (9.05 percent), a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as Russia itself (7.51 percent).

By also tagging countries with a student visa overstay rate of 15 percent or higher, the administration is able to sweep in six additional countries that do not exceed the visitor visa overstay rate threshold: Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, and Uganda. It seems like no coincidence that Nigeria lands just within this 15 percent threshold; in fiscal year 2023, more than 112,000 nationals of Nigeria came to the United States through visas now targeted for entry bans, far more than any other African country. When presented with such numbers in 2017, President Trump stated that once Nigerians had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

There are only five countries — the Federated States of Micronesia, Georgia, the Philippines, Independent State of Samoa, and Uzbekistan — that are above the administration’s overstay rate thresholds yet are not targeted in the current or anticipated entry bans. They have likely not been banned for geopolitical reasons. The Federated States of Micronesia is in a compact of free association with the United States, and Samoa has a similar relationship with New Zealand, a core U.S. ally. The United States has a major military cooperation agreement with the Philippines. Georgia and Uzbekistan are in Russia’s sphere of influence. Notably, none of these countries are in Africa.

There is no way to explain the choice of overstay rate as a metric, along with these arbitrary cutoffs and exceptions, without considering the demographic consequences. If the Trump administration reckoned by the absolute number of overstays, it would have to consider entry bans for much of Europe and Latin America. By insisting that the overstay rate is the valid metric, it found a way to expand the map into a broader Muslim and African ban.

The Screening and Vetting Rationale

The June 2025 proclamation, like the entry bans from the first Trump administration, rests in part on the claim that individuals must be excluded from the United States if their home government “lacks a competent or cooperative central authority for issuing passports or civil documents” or “appropriate screening and vetting measures.” The proclamation does not elaborate on what standards a country must have to be considered “competent,” “cooperative,” or “appropriate,” however, leaving room for unfettered discretion.

This justification suggests that the U.S. government relies on other countries’ security measures to make visa application decisions, but this is not the case. The United States relies on its own vetting; indeed, it has one of the most sophisticated vetting systems in the world. To suggest that the United States relies on information from troubled countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, or Yemen vastly undervalues that robust system.

The proclamation bans nationals of 10 countries in part because of this screening and vetting rationale. Of those 10 countries, the proclamation identifies 8 as lacking a competent or cooperative authority for issuing passports or civil documents. The government’s own guidance, however, indicates that those countries do have authorities that issue reliable documents. Specifically, State Department guidelines identify the civil authority within each country that issues passports and other documents and describes unique markings or indicia of reliability for them. According to these guidelines, reliable government documents are available from appropriate authorities in all 8 countries.

Applicants’ travel documents are fed into the United States’ extensive screening and vetting process along with information supplied in the visa application. (The Brennan Center analyzed this vetting system in detail when the first Trump administration imposed the Muslim ban in 2017.) The U.S. visa application requires background information, phone numbers and addresses, criminal history, security data, a photograph, a passport, fingerprints, proof of plans in the United States, proof of employment and financial autonomy, and proof of property ownership. That information is run through several databases, both classified and unclassified, where it is checked against millions of records to search for disqualifying criminal or national security information.

The databases pull from international and national sources and include the Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS), which checks security and intelligence data as well as records of lost, stolen, and revoked passports. It also includes information from Interpol sourced from law enforcement agencies in 198 countries, among them the 10 nations identified in the proclamation. CLASS culls data from several other sources as well, including the FBI, the Terrorist Screening Center, the National Targeting Center, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. Another database, the Pre-Adjudicated Threat Recognition Intelligence Operations Team Tracking System, draws from records from Interpol, Europol (the European Union’s law enforcement agency), and foreign governments. The data is then screened against CBP’s Automated Targeting System, an extensive database that includes information from law enforcement and watch lists of known or suspected terrorists.

After consular officers conduct these extensive screenings, they interview visa applicants to confirm their identity, probe any concerns or inconsistencies, and assess their credibility. Consular officers have broad discretion and will deny applications when the applicant has not established visa eligibility “to the satisfaction of the consular officer.” Visa denials are almost never subject to judicial review.

The rigor applied to visa applications is reflected in high denial rates, particularly for many of the countries listed in the new entry ban. In fiscal year 2024, the State Department refused 49 percent of applicants from Afghanistan and the Republic of Congo, 47 percent from Haiti, 37 percent from Venezuela, and 25 percent from Libya. For the remaining countries on the list, more than half of visa applications were denied. This demonstrates that the United States already has sufficient information to make individualized visa determinations, an approach that a bipartisan group of 52 former national security officials has said ensures national security better than any blanket ban.

Even after a visa is approved, the screening process is not done. When visa holders present their passports to airlines before boarding, the airlines send passenger manifests to CBP. Before visa holders enter the United States, CBP runs additional background checks. Its officers can deny entry if they find disqualifying information.

Given these sophisticated and thorough vetting procedures, it defies logic to say that the government relies on data from the 10 countries alleged to have insufficient security infrastructure. The incoherence of this rationale is further underscored by the entry ban’s lack of any exemption for even very young children or infants, who do not pose a security risk.

It is also curious that of the 10 countries where the proclamation invokes this screening and vetting rationale (Afghanistan, Cuba, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, and Yemen), only Cuba and Venezuela are on the “partial” ban list, which exempts certain temporary workers. Given that the main beneficiaries of this carve-out appear to be a few thousand baseball players, it is fair to ask whether this policy choice is less about national security and more about avoiding disruptions to season play and spring training. (All 19 countries also have an explicit exemption from the entry ban for participants in “the World Cup, Olympics, or [an]other major sporting event.”)

The No-Place-to-Deport Rationale

The June 2025 proclamation also asserts as a justification for banning eight countries the refusal of those countries to accept their nationals back after the United States deports them. The September 2017 ban also relied on this justification for three countries. Unlike the overstay and screening and vetting rationales, however, the proclamation does not ban any countries solely based on an inability to remove their nationals. It is difficult to know, then, how important this rationale is to the government. What is clear, however, is that it has no logical connection to the entry ban’s purported goal of preserving national security and public safety.

First, it is inaccurate that the United States cannot remove nationals of the countries listed in the ban. According to DHS’s own data, nationals of all eight countries on the list for this reason are routinely removed from the United States, even though six of the eight countries have few nationals in the United States at all. Because relatively few people are ever subject to removal in the first place, the data does not suggest that there is a significant problem. Additionally, Venezuela made an agreement with the United States to accept its deportees, raising questions as to why the no-place-to-deport rationale is used to ban Venezuelan nationals. Moreover, the Trump administration is ramping up its efforts to deport foreign nationals to third countries, a practice that the Supreme Court has permitted for now.

Second, a country’s unwillingness to accept its own nationals when they are deported from the United States has nothing to do with the risks that a visa applicant may pose to Americans. It is peculiar to suggest that the policy of a foreign government predicts behavior of its citizens that could constitute a public safety risk, particularly because those nationals may not support the government in their country of origin. Collective punishment does not make the United States any safer.

In summary, while limits to the acceptance of deportees may be a source of diplomatic frustration, the government does not rely on this justification alone to exclude nationals of any country, perhaps because its own data demonstrates that nationals are regularly deported to all eight countries. Instead, the justification appears to be an effort to make the entry bans sound more reasonable, but it does not hold up under review.

During his first term, through rhetoric and action, President Trump made clear that he wanted to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries, Africa, and Haiti. During the last election cycle, Trump added new nationalities to his disfavored list, repeating false attacks on Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants, and on his first day in office he shut down the U.S. refugee program for all but white Afrikaners from South Africa.

It should come as no surprise that the administration is now pursuing entry bans that target not only people from Muslim-majority countries but also the chief beneficiaries of Biden-era parole programs (granted for humanitarian reasons to Afghan, Cuban, Haitian, and Venezuelan nationals) along with those from Africa.

These latest entry bans come at a high cost. They will deprive the United States of the economic benefits that flow from tourism, investment, and international talent. Hospitals and universities in urban and rural areas alike will suffer. U.S. citizens and permanent residents will be robbed of their congressionally established privilege to live here with their husbands, wives, children, and other close family members.

What the entry bans will not do, and were not designed to do, is make Americans safer.

About the Authors

Margy O’Herron is a senior fellow in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, where she focuses on the intersection of national security and immigration law and policy. She was previously a senior adviser on immigration at the Domestic Policy Council in the Executive Office of the President of the United States and held multiple roles in the Department of Justice, including managing the immigration portfolio in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General and serving as a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals. She is also an immigration law and policy fellow at Cornell Law School.

Doug Rand served as senior adviser to the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2021 to 2025 and as assistant director for entrepreneurship in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2010 to 2017. He is also a cofounder of Boundless, a technology company that empowers individuals, families, and businesses to navigate the immigration system more confidently, rapidly, and affordably. Currently, he is codirector of the Talent Mobility Fund, a program of Renaissance Philanthropy. This paper represents his personal views and research.