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Travel Ban List
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Travel Ban List

United States
Written by
Michael Ray
Michael Ray is an assistant managing editor who has worked at Britannica since 2003. In addition to leading the Geography and History team, he oversees coverage of European history and military affairs....
Michael Ray
Fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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History

The first—and thus far only—major federal legislation to explicitly suspend immigration to the United States for a specific nationality was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Since then, immigration and travel to the United States have been restricted to various groups at various times through a mixture of legislative and executive action. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA; also called the McCarran-Walter Act) sought to standardize the patchwork of region- or race-based quotas that were in place at the time.

Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act states:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

This passage (which appears under Title 8 of the U.S. Code in §1182: Inadmissible aliens) was cited as the legal foundation for the so-called “Muslim ban” during the first presidency of Donald Trump. On January 27, 2017, a week after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). The ban was immediately challenged in court, and Trump responded with two more orders. The last of these, commonly referred to as “Travel Ban 3.0,” blocked almost all travelers from five primarily Muslim countries—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—as well as North Korea. Certain Venezuelan government officials and their families were also included in the third ban. On June 26, 2018, in a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Travel Ban 3.0 was “squarely within the scope of Presidential authority under the INA,” and it remained in effect for the remainder of Trump’s term. On Pres. Joe Biden’s first day in office in 2021, he issued a proclamation revoking the Trump-era travel bans.

Trump returned to the presidency in 2025, and on June 4 he issued a proclamation banning travel to the United States from 19 countries. On December 16 Trump issued a second proclamation, adding 20 more countries as well as the Palestinian Authority to the original list

Michael Ray