Trump's June 2025 Travel Ban and Chad's Retaliation

On June 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Presidential Proclamation 10949, imposing a full entry ban on citizens of 12 countries and partial restrictions on seven more, effective June 9. It was the administration’s second major travel ban of the year, following a February executive order targeting South Africa over its land reform law, and it hit Africa harder than any other continent: of the 19 countries named, seven, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, faced a total ban, while Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Togo faced partial visa restrictions.

The administration said Trump made his final decision to sign the proclamation after an antisemitic firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado, on June 1, 2025, allegedly carried out by an Egyptian national, though Egypt itself was not included on the list and officials said the policy had been under review for months before that attack. The White House framed the ban around three criteria applied country by country: high visa overstay rates, inadequate identity screening and vetting capacity, and a government’s unwillingness to accept its own deported nationals. Chad’s inclusion was justified by citing overstay rates the administration put at roughly 50 percent for both B1/B2 visitor visas and student and exchange visas. Somalia was described as a “terrorist safe haven” whose government lacked control over its own territory. Libya, Eritrea, and Sudan were cited for weak central authority, unreliable civil documentation, and, in Eritrea and Libya’s cases, past US and international accusations of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by state or non-state actors operating within their borders.

Of the seven fully banned African countries, only Chad responded with a matching countermeasure. President Mahamat Idriss Déby announced on Facebook on June 5 that he had “instructed the government to act in accordance with the principles of reciprocity” and suspend visa issuance to US citizens, writing that “Chad has no planes to offer, no billions of dollars to give, but Chad has its dignity and pride to defend.” The remark referenced Chad’s markedly weaker bargaining position compared to wealthier nations that had negotiated exemptions or delays through diplomatic and economic leverage the Sahelian country did not have. Chad’s move was largely symbolic given the low volume of American travel to N’Djamena, but it was notable as the only reciprocal retaliation among the seven banned African states, several of which, including Sudan and Libya, were already consumed by internal conflict and lacked the functioning state capacity to mount a formal diplomatic response at all.

The 2025 ban followed the structure of Trump’s first-term travel restrictions, which began in 2017 with an order targeting several Muslim-majority countries and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018 after multiple revisions, but it expanded the list considerably and, unlike the earlier ban, applied no exceptions for existing visa holders whose documents had not yet been issued before the effective date. Rights groups and immigration attorneys criticized the policy’s stated rationale as pretextual, noting that visa overstay statistics used to justify individual country bans were drawn from small annual sample sizes for some nations and that similar or higher overstay rates existed among countries left off the list entirely.