The travel ban barring citizens from mainly African and Middle Eastern countries went into effect on Monday.
Most people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen are no longer allowed entry into the United States due to last week’s presidential proclamation. Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela also face significant visa restrictions.
Logan Airport does not have direct service to any of the nations targeted by the new restrictions. A spokesperson for Massport, which owns the airport, told GBH News that if a traveler from one of those countries arrived in Boston after a layover, Customs and Border Protection would turn them away during the passport verification process at Logan.
While the full impact of the travel ban remains to be seen, local immigrants and legal advocates are concerned about the looming ramifications. Massachusetts’ large Haitian community worry that family members overseas won’t be able to escape gang violence and economic strain in the country. Immigrants from other countries are also concerned about loved ones living in dangerous situations.
Fikiri Amisi, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, spent seven years in a refugee camp in Zimbabwe before arriving in the U.S. in November 2018.
He still has family overseas in Congo and refugee camps in other countries, including his brothers and cousins.
“With this ban, they won’t be able to come. This happened to me in 2017,” he said referring to the ban on many Muslim countries during the first Trump administration.
“The condition where they live is unacceptable. And when I heard about this travel ban — it’s like having pain over pain in their lives,” he said.
Amisi is now a U.S. citizen living in Springfield, Massachusetts, and works as an employment specialist for Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, an organization that helps refugees. He hopes that the Trump administration will reconsider its ban.
President Donald Trump cited the restrictions as a matter of national security.
Oren Sellstrom, litigation director at Lawyers for Civil Rights, said the ban is “rooted in discrimination, not national security.”
“There are significant issues around what countries have been chosen and why,” Sellstrom said. “It’s a continuation of the xenophobic and discriminatory policies we’ve seen since day one of this administration.”
The proclamation offered various reasons for why countries were included in the travel ban, ranging from “large scale presence of terrorists” to high rates of visa overstays in the United States.
For the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Trump administration claimed that visa overstays for five different types of visas ranged from 29 to 35%.
For Iran, the proclamation said the country is a ”state sponsor of terrorism— and fails to cooperate with the United States Government in identifying security risks.”
For immigrants from Haiti, the Trump administration claims visa overstays for certain visas to be between 25 and 31%. The Trump administration claims hundreds of thousands of Haitians came to the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration, “creating acute risks of increased overstay rates, establishment of criminal networks, and other national security threats.”
Unless individuals from the countries meet a very slim criteria for exemption to the ban, their applications for a visa will be rejected. It excludes the family members of refugees and asylees in the U.S., with no humanitarian exceptions. The ban doesn’t revoke visas previously issued to people from countries on the list, according to a guidance from the federal government. The ban provides exceptions for Afghan Special Immigrant visa holders and some persecuted minorities from Iran.
Additionally, U.S. citizens who have citizenship in one of the restricted countries, green card holders who have legal residency in the U.S., athletes and coaches traveling to the U.S. for the World Cup, certain family members who applied for visas, and children adopted by U.S. citizens are among the exempted groups.
During the first Trump administration, an executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries garnered significant successful legal challenges, including in Massachusetts. The Supreme Court eventually upheld a revised version of that travel ban, which was terminated by the Biden administration in 2021.
The current travel ban differs from the 2017 restriction because it is more broad.
Sellstrom said the rollout of the travel restrictions could be comparable to immigration policies already in place by the administration that have led to people being barred from entering the U.S.
“What we’ve certainly seen from this administration is many times taking immediate steps to turn people around and send them back to where they have come from, whether or not that is legal,” he said. “We have seen that in a number of instances where even when federal courts have ruled that that type of activity is illegal.”
