by Jose Roca
The Trump Administration has decided to announce on Sunday, September 24th,2017, that 3 new countries have been added to the list of travel bans. One of the countries being North Korea, as a result of the tension that has been between the U.S. and North Korea.
Although North Korea has such a minimum amount of visitors coming to the U.S., it has been a country that has been making it really difficult to cooperate with, senior officials from several agencies, including the U.S. state department and the department of Homeland Security (DHS) spoke on condition of anonymity (according to www.usatoday.com).
“These restrictions are required and they are conditions-based, and not time-based,” one senior official said. “The objective is not to indefinitely block people from coming to our country. The objective is to protect American people until other governments comply with our standards and no longer pose a possible threat to our people.”
The official also said that DHS secretary Elaine Duke will be updating president Trump on the ban every 180 days, and that countries may come off this list as they review them, but he admitted that other countries may be added to this list as conditions dictate. “The bottom line is that we are no longer allowing information-sharing deficiencies to threaten our security.”
North Korea is not the only country added to this list, Chad and Venezuela were also added. Although in Venezuela the travel ban is only going to affect its country’s leaders and their families, meaning that Its citizens will not be affected as long as they are not family members of someone that works for Venezuela’s government.
One country fell from the travel ban list issued at the beginning of this year, that country is Sudan, they have decided to take it off the list because Sudan’s cooperation with the U.S. government has been appreciated and it was appropriate to remove it from the list.
Chad, on the other hand, was added to the list even though it’s considered as a counter-terrorism partner, because it did not share terrorism related information and other information the U.S. required them to share.
(credits to www.usatoday.com and to www.bbc.com).
Editor’s note: As of press time, courts have ruled the travel bans to be unconstitutional.