Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is stopping all immigration applications from 19 countries in response to last week’s deadly shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC.
What’s changing? The pause covers 12 countries that were already under a travel ban imposed earlier this year, as well as seven others facing partial restrictions. Under the new policy, all green card and citizenship applications will be halted for immigrants from those countries. US Citizenship and Immigration Services also said that immigration cases dating back to the start of the Biden administration will be re-reviewed.
The affected countries are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
What’s the context? This is part of a broader immigration crackdown by the Trump administration in response to the DC shooting, including a pause on asylum applications. The shooting suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who worked with a CIA-backed paramilitary unit in his home country before entering the US in 2021.
What’s the big picture? Even before the most recent restrictions, President Donald Trump (and White House deputy chief of staff/anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller) choked off many sources of immigration to the US. In October, the Trump administration set its annual refugee cap at just 7,500 people, compared to 125,000 under President Joe Biden. Of those 7,500, nearly all may be white South Africans — beneficiaries of what is largely an imagined crisis on the part of the Trump administration.
Why does this matter? Trump is seizing on the DC shooting as an opportunity to advance a much broader, much uglier anti-immigration agenda, with a particular focus on excluding immigrants from non-white countries. The latest example of that came just yesterday: Trump attacked Somali immigrants in a Cabinet meeting, calling them “garbage” and telling reporters that “I don't want them in our country.”
