US President Donald Trump is considering the imposition of the travel ban for the civilians of 43 countries under their new travel ban list. According to Reuters, the new list is divided into three different categories- Red, Orange and Yellow. The first group includes 11 countries like Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba which are banned outright, which means no visa will be given to these countries. The second group includes 10 countries like Haiti, Pakistan, Myanmar and South Sudan, where the travel ban would impose certain restrictions but the countries would not be completely cut off. Here business elites might be allowed to enter, but not to the people who are immigrants or are travelling on tourist visas, and so it requires in-person interviews for travelers. In the third group, the US has included 22 countries like Mali, Zimbabwe and Cambodia, where the countries will have sixty days to clear their concerns or the countries will get a partial suspension on the visas. According to an article published by the New York Times, the Red List countries include Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, and Yemen. The Orange List includes Belarus, Haiti, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, South Sudan, Laos, Eritrea, Laos, Sierra Leone, and Turkmenistan. In the Yellow List there are Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Sao Tome and Principe, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe.

There are seven countries in the Red List which have remained on the banned list as they were earlier in a different iteration of Trump’s 2017 “Muslim Travel Ban”. They are generally Muslim-majority countries or poor, weak and corrupt African countries. These lists were made after Trump gave an executive order on 20th January to the State Department to identify countries in 60 days “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals form those countries”. What Trump said was to protect the American people “from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes”.

According to the State Department, Trump’s order was to protect the country and their citizens by providing them top national security and public safety from terrorism, illegal migration and hateful ideology. The senior officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity has stressed that these lists are not final and are still to be approved by the US administration. They are currently being reviewed by the embassy officials and the security specialists at different departments and intelligence agencies.

Now there are several questions that will come to everyone’s mind, which is what will be its implications on India? Because most of these listed countries share their border with India. Bhutan’s inclusion in the Red List is still not clear but the possible assumption could be the challenges during the verification of travelers or could be the rise in the number of cases related to visa violations. India has complex relations with all these countries which could influence the interactions between regions encompassing the political, social, economic and cultural aspects. This could also affect the diplomatic relations and cooperation initiatives between its neighbors.

This also marks a significant shift in America’s foreign policy, unlike during the time of President Joe Biden where he revoked Trump’s travel bans (except North Korea which is still in the ban list) calling them a stain in the national moral sense, which was inconsistent with their long history of welcoming people from all over the world. Joe Biden had said this because during the first term of Donald Trump, courts blocked the first two versions of the ban on travel, the first one being the Washington vs Trump in February 2017 and the second one was the Trump vs Hawaii, which was one of the most successful lawsuits. Later, the Supreme Court permitted a rewritten notion, but in doing so it rejected the constitutional challenges of the ban. The ban imposed full visa restrictions on the citizens of eight countries mostly the Muslim majority countries including Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela and North Korea.

It is not clear that whether the new travel ban could impact the green card holders from the banned countries or the existing visas would be canceled for the people. For example, opposing the fact, Trump canceled the green card of a former Colombia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil over his protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. In the current scenario the immigration lawyers are advising the people who have H-1B visa and their families, international students or the green card holders who are from countries which are facing ban, to delay their travel outside US. They have not given the immediate reason but one can simply figure out, from the delays in stamping at US consulate in one’s own country. When Trump first issued a travel ban on Muslims during his first term, the countries on his list during that session were Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The order restricted the refugees form Syria. That affected the individuals notwithstanding their status of immigration, including the green card holders and those who have employment-based visas. The travelers who had valid visas were denied entry. That sparked several protests across the country and there was chaos in the airports.

Trump had warned about this in his sweeping speech on October 2023 where he vowed to ban entry from the countries which were labelled as security threats. This included the countries that existed under the Gaza Strip; Libya, Somalia, Syria and the Yemen. Trump pledged that he would reinstate the ban, and he did so, without wasting any time he signed the executive order which was titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats” on the first day in his second term. The final decision is expected by 21st March for the ultimate Travel Ban order.

.    .    .