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Countries across the world were in shock Thursday after President Donald Trump announced a travel ban on nationals from a dozen countries and the cancellation of visa programs for seven more. For many, the move seemed like a return to 2017 and one of the most controversial policies of Trump’s first term.
Trump on Wednesday cited national security and terrorism concerns as motivating factors behind the ban on nationals largely from Africa and Asia, triggering reactions from representatives of those countries that ranged from weary diplomacy to downright anger.
Chad, a nation in Central Africa that is among the countries hit with a travel ban, quickly issued a reciprocal restriction on issuing visas to U.S. citizens. “Chad has no planes to offer, no billions of dollars to give but Chad has its dignity and pride,” President Idriss Deby wrote on Facebook Thursday.
Trump’s new order affects a patchwork of 19 countries — some of them banned for the first time, for reasons that the administration said include high rates of visa overstays, lack of “appropriate screening and vetting measures” and allegedly being sponsors of terrorism.
Nationals of 12 countries will be barred from entering the United States: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Partial bans have also been placed on nationals from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
After the Trump administration cancelled a special visa program with Venezuela on Wednesday, the country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, described the U.S. government as “fascist,” adding that “they persecute our countrymen, our people for no reason.”
“The truth is being in the United States is a big risk for anybody, not just for Venezuelans,” he said during a weekly show on state television.
Many on the list are majority-Muslim countries, and several began observing the Hajj pilgrimage holiday late Wednesday, making an immediate response less likely. Officials at U.S. embassies in Libya, Chad, Eritrea, Sudan and Turkmenistan were not available for comment.
Still, Shawn VanDiver, president of the Afghan refugee advocacy group #AfghanEvac, referred to the ban as “political theater” and “a second Muslim Ban, dressed up in bureaucracy.”
Trump began a video address Wednesday by citing the recent violence in Boulder, Colorado, where an Egyptian man seeking asylum with an expired tourist visa injured at least 12 demonstrators in what city officials called an antisemitic attack, as justification for the renewed travel ban.
Egypt is not on the list of banned countries, but its absence speaks to the importance of Egyptian influence both on American Middle East policy and in the region at large, said Ahmed Soliman, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
Trump’s order largely affects “conflict-prone [nations], or ones which have security issues at this time, or don’t have the diplomatic or security heft to respond very aggressively to this U.S. ban,” Soliman said. “We’re not seeing the U.S. going after its strategic partners in either the Middle East or Africa.”
The White House’s decision prompted a rebuke from the African Union Commission, which in a statement Thursday urged the U.S. to exercise its right to protect its borders “in a manner that is balanced, evidence-based, and reflective of the long-standing partnership between the United States and Africa.”
“The Commission remains concerned about the potential negative impact of such measures on … relations that have been carefully nurtured over decades,” it said.
It was a relatively tame statement from a body that represents nations already disproportionately affected by the Trump administration’s decision to cut USAID programs.
International aid groups have condemned the new ban, with Amnesty International on Thursday calling it “discriminatory, racist, and downright cruel” in a post on X.
Somalia, which had its American assistance slashed and U.S. military aid in training local forces to fight terrorist groups pulled, struck a similarly conciliatory tone.
“Somalia values its longstanding relationship with the United States and stands ready to engage in dialogue to address the concerns raised,” Dahir Hassan Abdi, the Somali ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement Wednesday.
The administration pointed to terrorism as a reason for banning travel from Somalia.
“The United States Government has identified Somalia as a terrorist safe haven. Terrorists use regions of Somalia as safe havens from which they plan, facilitate, and conduct their operations,” according to a statement released by the White House. “The Government of Somalia struggles to provide governance needed to limit terrorists’ freedom of movement.”
Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a nonpartisan and independent public policy research organization, said terrorist attacks by nationals from the 12 countries facing outright bans are rare.
“A single terrorist from those countries murdered one person in an attack on U.S. soil: Emanuel Kidega Samson from Sudan, who committed an attack motivated by anti-white animus in 2017. The annual chance of being murdered by a terrorist from one of the banned countries from 1975 to the end of 2024 was about 1 in 13.9 billion per year,” Nowrasteh wrote.
Trump’s order also pulls the rug from under nearly 200,000 Afghans who have relocated to the U.S. since America’s chaotic and botched exit from the country in 2021. That includes about 14,000 resettled refugees who arrived in the 12 months through September.
Trump, who suspended refugee resettlement for Afghans on his first day in office, on Wednesday criticized Afghanistan’s passport authority and its screening and vetting measures.
Representatives of the Afghan government did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
“To include Afghanistan — a nation whose people stood alongside American service members for 20 years — is a moral disgrace. It spits in the face of our allies, our veterans, and every value we claim to uphold,” #AfghanEvac’s VanDiver added.
For experts watching Trump’s approach to the developing world since before he first took office in 2017, the move was less of a surprise.
Trump has for years expressed a desire to limit immigration from Haiti and African nations, deriding them as “shithole” countries in discussing the visa lottery system at a White House meeting in 2018.
Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science at the University College of London, called the president’s latest move “part and parcel of an ‘America First’ foreign policy.”
The travel plan and visa cancellation sends “a loud and clear message,” said Gift, “that America isn’t an open, pluralist nation that welcomes the world to its shores.”
CORRECTION (June 5, 2025, 1:17 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misidentified a fellow at Chatham House who explained why Egypt was not on Trump’s travel ban list. It was Senior Research Fellow Ahmed Soliman, not Associate Fellow Ahmed Aboudouh. (Both are fellows at the think tank.)
Astha Rajvanshi is a reporter for NBC News Digital, based in London. Previously, she worked as a staff writer covering international news for TIME.
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