Late yesterday President Trump proclaimed a new ban on entry to the US or issuance of new US visas to citizens of twelve countries, and ordered drastic restrictions on entry or issuance of visas to citizens of seven others.

The US has long sought to globalize its surveillance and control of travelers.

In the past, the US has held out the carrot of possible admission to the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to induce governments of favored countries to share information about their citizens with the US. Citizens of countries in the VWP are eligible to enter the US for limited stays and purposes with a simpler, cheaper ESTA rather than a full US visa.

Now the US is using the stick of a travel ban to induce governments of disfavored countries similarly to cooperate, under duress, with US demands that they serve as foreign agents of the US government in identifying, tracking, and collecting and sharing information about their citizens. The countries subject to this new form of transactional, sanctions-based “diplomacy” are those which are unlikely ever be admitted to the VWP.

This latest US travel ban isn’t exclusively limited to countries with mostly-Muslim populations like the series of travel bans proclaimed by  President Trump during his first administration, but was immediately denounced as “transparently racist”.

In addition to its direct effects on the right to travel, freedom of association, and the rights of asylum seekers, the new travel ban appears to be intended as a tool to pressure foreign governments to collaborate with the US in surveillance of their citizens, thereby weaponizing US travel controls to expand extraterritorial US surveillance outsourced to foreign governments.

President Trump’s latest travel proclamation is based on 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f):

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.

The discretion this law gives the President to proclaim standardless summary denials or restrictions of travel and other rights is an invitation to arbitrariness and discrimination. We think this law is unconstitutional on its face, violates US treaty obligations (especially when the restrictions imposed by Presidential proclamation make no exception or allowance for the rights of asylum seekers), and should be repealed by Congress.

This law has been used by every recent US President. What’s different in yesterday’s proclamation is the primary focus not on any alleged threat to the US posed by citizens of the blacklisted countries, but on the  lack of cooperation with US travel surveillance and control (“screening and vetting”) by the governments of the countries whose citizens are targeted by the travel ban.

The implication is that this travel ban is a sanction against these governments, and that if they play ball with the US in surveillance and pre-crime predictive policing of travelers, the US might reconsider or amelioriate the travel ban.

Here’s how President Trump explained some of the basis for his proclamation:

I directed the Secretary of State, in coordination with the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence, to identify countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a full or partial suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries…. After completing that process, the Secretary of State determined that a number of countries remain deficient with regards to screening and vetting….

I remain committed to engaging with those countries willing to cooperate to improve information-sharing and identity-management procedures….

Some of the countries with inadequacies face significant challenges to reform efforts. Others have made important improvements to their protocols and procedures, and I commend them for these efforts. But until countries with identified inadequacies address them, members of my Cabinet have recommended certain conditional restrictions and limitations….

Information-sharing and identity-management protocols and practices of foreign governments are important for the effectiveness of the screening and vetting protocols and procedures of the United States. Governments manage the identity and travel documents of their nationals and residents. They also control the circumstances under which they provide information about their nationals to other governments…  It is, therefore, the policy of the United States to take all necessary and appropriate steps to encourage foreign governments to improve their information-sharing and identity-management protocols and practices and to regularly share their identity and threat information with the immigration screening and vetting systems of the United States….

The restrictions and limitations imposed by this proclamation are necessary to garner cooperation from foreign governments.

The proclamation mentions some other reasons for the new travel blacklist, but they are secondary to the primary goals of identification and pre-crime predictive control.

There are some exceptions to the new travel blacklist, but, notably, they don’t appear to include those seeking asylum or who fear torture if returned to the countries of their citizenship.  The proclamation cites the percentages of citizens of the blacklisted countries who overstay their US visas, but doesn’t mention what percentage of those visa overstayers apply for, or are granted, asylum after they arrive in the US, rendering the duration of any visa they may have had moot.

Another oddity of this new travel ban is that individuals holding valid US visas for future entry and located outside the US as of the effective date of the proclamation (12:01 am EDT on Monday, June 9, 2025), will remain eligible to enter or re-enter the US. But those holding valid visas who are inside the US as of the effective date of the proclamation, even if they hold long-term multiple-entry visas, will not be allowed to re-enter the US if they leave.

This presents citizens of the newly-blacklisted countries now in the US with long-term multiple-entry visas a difficult choice: If they leave the US immediately, so that they are outside the US when the proclamation comes into force at midnight Sunday night, they might preserve their eligibility to re-enter the US, perhaps repeatedly, until their current visas expire. But if they leave the US now, they might find that their visas are then revoked or that they are denied re-entry on other grounds, with little or no recourse.