The administration of U.S President Donald Trump has added Uganda and Tanzania to a list of countries that are facing possible ban from traveling to the U.S. This is according to a memo signed by the U.S Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The U.S travel ban watchlist memo contains 36 countries which the U.S is giving 60 days to meet requirements that have been set by the U.S State Department, failure to which they will face deportations.
Out of the countries in this list, 25 are in Africa. The African countries in the list include Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The other countries in the list include several in Asia and the Caribbean. These countries are Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia all of which are in the Caribbean, and Bhutan, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, and Syria from Asia, as well as and three countries in Oceania namely Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.
According to a report in the Washington Post, these countries have not met various benchmarks, including what the State Department has termed as “no competent or cooperative central government authority” to provide reliable identity documents or a large number of citizens who have violated the terms of their visas.
The new list comes barely two weeks after the U.S banned the nationals of twelve countries from traveling to the United States. The majority of countries whose citizens are in the list of nationals banned from traveling to U.S are from African countries. Only 5 out of the twelve in the list of countries banned from U.S are not from Africa.
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The African countries in the list include Chad, Libya, Somalia, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Sudan, and Equatorial Guinea. The remaining countries are Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, Myanmar, and Iran.
“I have determined to partially restrict and limit the entry of nationals of the following 7 countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. These restrictions distinguish between, but apply to both, the entry of immigrants and nonimmigrants,” President Trump said in an executive proclamation that was released by the White House.
