Public office, private gain

Last month, US President Donald Trump banned or severely restricted nationals of 20 additional countries from entering the United States, expanding the entry restrictions he put in place in June, supposedly to mitigate "national security and public safety threats."

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But a cursory glance at the list of targeted countries makes clear that this is just another case of ethnonationalist politics dressed up as an anti-terrorism measure.Many of the countries Trump targeted in 2025 - including Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Haiti, Laos, Malawi, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe - have virtually no history of exporting transnational terrorism. But a large share of them - 16 out of the 20 announced last month and 26 of the 39 targeted in 2025 - are in Africa. The obvious conclusion, especially in light of Trump's wider agenda and rhetoric, is that racial bias is informing US policy, much as religious bias guided his first administration's 2017 restrictions on travel and resettlement from seven Muslim-majority countries.

To be sure, US officials say their decisions reflect "demonstrated, persistent, and severe deficiencies in screening, vetting, and information-sharing," as well as criteria like visa-overstay rates and even refusal to accept US deportation flights. But these justifications are more improvised than airtight. For example, as the American Immigration Council observes, the Trump administration is using non-immigrant overstay rates to justify bans on immigrant visas.