The Trump administration announced it is expanding its travel ban to more than 30 countries in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, DC, by an Afghan national.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the expansion of the June travel ban, which barred 19 countries from partially or entirely sending their citizens to the US.
“If they don’t have a stable government there, if they don’t have a country that can sustain itself and tell us who those individuals are and help us vet them, why should we allow people from that country to come here to the United States?” Noem asked Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday.
DHS did not announce which countries will be included in the expanded ban and did not state when it will go into effect.
The June ban fully restricted travel from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
That ban also established partial restrictions on Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
The Trump administration’s US Citizenship and Immigration Services further directed a hold on green card and citizenship applications for people from those 19 countries.
The agency also announced a hold on “all pending asylum applications, regardless of the alien’s country of nationality.”
The ramped up restrictions come in the wake of the broad-daylight shooting of two West Virginia National Guard troops in Washington, DC, on Nov. 26. The attack was carried out by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who came to the US under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome.
National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, was killed in Lakanwal’s ambush, while Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, was critically wounded.
Lakanwal has been charged with murder, possessing a firearm during a crime of violence, and assault with intent to kill while armed.
One day before the heinous attack, Mohammad Dawood Alokozay, who also migrated under the OAW program, was arrested for threatening to carry out a suicide attack in Fort Worth, Texas.
A third Afghan national, Jaan Shah Safi, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Virginia, with the agency alleging his Temporary Protected Status was terminated and, further accusing him of being a terrorist who provided material support to ISIS-K, according to a DHS release.
