The Trump administration is considering expanding its travel ban — which currently restricts or bars the entry of nationals from 19 countries — to around 30 nations in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., last week, multiple U.S. officials told CBS News on Tuesday.
The plans are preliminary and the number of countries added to the list could change, said the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. CNN reported on Tuesday morning that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was recommending expanding the travel ban to between 30 and 32 countries.
After a meeting with President Trump on Monday, Noem said on X that she had urged him to impose “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
“Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS,” Noem wrote in her X post.
The Trump administration has cited the attack in Washington — which was allegedly carried out by an Afghan man who entered the U.S. in September 2021 and was granted asylum in April 2025 — to further expand its immigration crackdown. It has halted all visa and immigration processing for Afghan nationals, paused asylum case decisions for all nationalities and ordered a full-scale review of green card cases involving immigrants from the 19 countries currently subject to the travel ban.
The plans being considered would significantly broaden the scope of a proclamation issued by Mr. Trump over the summer that partially or fully barred legal immigration and travel from 19 countries, most of them in Asia and Africa.
That proclamation, referred to as a travel ban by supporters and critics alike, imposed a near-total restriction on the entry of people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. It also partially suspended the entry of travelers and immigrants from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
At the time, Mr. Trump said the proclamation was needed to mitigate concerns about terrorist activity in some of the nations on the list, the inability to properly vet some of the affected nationals and the refusal by certain countries to cooperate on deportation flights from the U.S.
In a statement Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said it would announce the new additions to the list of countries affected by the travel ban “soon.”
