Trump's Travel Bans: The Art of the Deal?

The bans are a tool to force foreign governments to accept and imprison deportees from the U.S. and fuel the establishment of a vast network of foreign gulags.

Photo credit: shutterstock_574850539

The imposition last week of a new travel ban against citizens from a list of designated countries was overshadowed by other events, including Donald Trump’s activation of the National Guard in Los Angeles, his deployment of the Marines on U.S. soil, his pathetic military parade in Washington, D.C., and the inspiring spectacle of millions of protestors across the United States peacefully demonstrating against the authoritarian excesses of the Trump regime.

Trump famously imposed targeted, discriminatory travel bans during his first administration. But there is something dangerously insidious about this latest wave of travel bans. While the government is banning citizens of certain countries from entering the United States, it is also seeking to deport people who are not citizens thereof to some of those same countries. These new bans appear to be, at least in part, an effort to pressure foreign governments into accepting and imprisoning deportees from the United States.

Some History

During the first week of the first Trump administration in 2017, the government’s issuance of a travel ban against citizens of a number of Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan) was a watershed moment. It compelled hundreds of immigration lawyers and advocates to rush out to the airports to advise affected immigrants and provide support to their families; fueled a new wave of protest against the government’s immigration policies; and was even responsible for the establishment of new nonprofits and related initiatives working in the area of immigration policy reform and advocacy.

The first 2017 travel ban — which Trump openly called a “Muslim Ban” — was initially blocked by the Supreme Court because of its overt anti-Muslim animus. A second iteration rescinded the first ban and imposed a second one but was partially blocked on constitutional grounds. A third iteration was partially blocked on statutory grounds, but it also cleverly included some non-Muslim-majority countries (including North Korea and Venezuela), a blatant ploy meant to deflect from the obviously anti-Muslim discriminatory intent. A fourth iteration added some additional countries and conditions. President Biden revoked the Trump travel bans on his first day in office.

The New Travel Ban

The Trump regime’s new travel ban went into effect on Monday, June 9, 2025. It bans travel to the United States (with certain exceptions) by citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. (It also includes some restrictions, but not a complete ban against travel, for citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.)

Is there a connection between banning travel to the United States from these particular countries and coercing some of the same countries into accepting U.S. deportees?

I couldn’t help but notice that the list of banned countries included countries that the government has recently been choosing as the designated country of removal for noncitizens of those countries, specifically Equatorial Guinea and Libya. Immigration lawyers who represent foreign nationals in removal proceedings (colloquially known as deportation proceedings) have been sharing stories about these bizarre mismatches for a few weeks now. In other words, a lawyer going into immigration court with a client from, for example, Honduras, might be told that the lawyer representing the government is asking the judge to agree that, if the person is not found to have a defense against removal, they be removed to, for example, South Sudan (another real example).

This made me wonder: What is really going on here? Is there a connection between banning travel to the United States from these particular countries and coercing some of the same countries into accepting U.S. deportees? What’s the rest of the story?

Now the Trump regime is contemplating issuing another travel ban against citizens of a long list of countries, the majority (but not all) of which are in Africa: 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.

The internal government memorandum announcing this new list of countries makes clear that my initial hunch was right: the government is using the travel ban, or the threat of a travel ban, to pressure foreign governments into receiving and imprisoning people deported from the United States.

Although the memo itself has not been made public, the Washington Post has reported that it “stated that if a country was willing to accept third-country nationals who were removed from the United States … it could mitigate other concerns.” Those “other concerns” that would keep countries on the travel ban list include widespread government fraud, unreliable civil identification documents or large numbers of citizens who have overstayed their U.S. visas.

Can anyone explain to me how a country agreeing to serve as an off-site concentration camp for the United States serves to “mitigate” the “concerns” mentioned above?

This is a new step in creating a vast network of foreign gulags that will enable the U.S. government to deport large numbers of foreign nationals, with no due process, into a shadow system of concentration camps off U.S. soil and beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

No, what is really happening is that the current Trump regime is not only expanding on the “travel ban” concept from the first administration, it is using the threat of a travel ban to incentivize countries to let the United States banish deportees to those countries. This is a new step in creating a vast network of foreign gulags that will enable the U.S. government to deport large numbers of foreign nationals, with no due process, into a shadow system of concentration camps off U.S. soil and beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

We have already seen the horrors of the Center for Terrorism Confinement (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT) prison camp in El Salvador. We know about the use of Guantanamo to house deportees, and the government’s promises to expand its use. What will happen to deportees sent to any of the countries on the new travel ban list? And will the United States pay these countries — like it has paid El Salvador — millions of dollars to detain deportees in inhumane prison conditions? Or perhaps the U.S. won’t have to pay them in cash at all, only in the promise to remove them from the travel ban list?

This is coercion. Blackmail. A classic mafioso move, on a world-stage scale: I’m gonna break your legs, unless you do me a favor.

It’s the art of the deal, authoritarian Trump 2.0 style.