Revealed: Analyst details motivation for Trump’s sprawling travel bans

18 June

U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on the South Lawn of the White House on June 12, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks/Flickr)

Although Donald Trump enacted a travel ban during his first presidency, he is taking it much further this time.

Trump is now imposing either total travel bans or travel restrictions on 19 different countries. And according to reporting in The New York Times, as many as 36 other countries could be added.

The Times, Charlie Savage and Edward Wong report, reviewed a June 14 cable that shows how much Trump and his allies could expand their travel bans or restrictions.

"This month, Mr. Trump imposed a full ban on entry to the United States on citizens of 12 countries and a partial ban on seven more, reviving a form of a much-disputed policy from his first term," Savage and Wong explain in an article published on June 16. "The cable says that in addition to the 19 countries, the State Department had identified 36 more that must improve on certain benchmarks within 60 days. It set a deadline of 8 p.m. eastern time on Wednesday, (June 18) for the affected governments to provide remediation plans."

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and former immigration lawyer for the Immigrant Justice Corps, is offering legal analysis on the Times' reporting and Trump's motivations for greatly expanding its travel bans and restrictions.

In a June 18 post on X, formerly Twitter, Reichlin-Melnick explained, "Trump is using the threat of travel bans to coerce random tiny countries around the world to accept deportations of people from totally different countries."

Trump, Reichlin-Melnick added, "wants" U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "to be able to dump people anywhere they feel like, even if it's not their country, no matter how dangerous."

According to Savage and Wong, "The countries on the new list included Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Ethiopia, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia and Zimbabwe."

Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

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