Why Would Trump Want To Ban Bhutanese People?
One of President Donald Trump’s acts during his first term was the so-called Muslim ban. Building on a 2015 campaign promise to enact “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” he banned all entry by seven Muslim-majority nationalities. After extensive court battles and airport chaos, the ban list shifted around and grew to include some non-Muslim adversary countries.
Trump has promised to “bring back the travel ban” in his second term and ordered the State Department to identify countries whose security situation would “warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals.” The new proposed ban list was leaked to The New York Times over the weekend. Along with classic adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, and war-torn countries such as Syria and Yemen, the list also includes the tranquil Himalayan mountain kingdom of Bhutan.
The Land of the Thunder Dragon, an isolated country of less than 800,000 people, doesn’t have any internal or external wars at the moment. It suffers from “relatively little crime,” according to the U.S. State Department’s own reports. Although there is no U.S. embassy (and almost no other foreign embassy) in Bhutan, the U.S. ambassador to neighboring India “maintains frequent and friendly communications with the Royal Bhutanese Embassy in New Delhi,” the State Department reports.
The Trump administration has not offered any explanation of why Bhutan is in its crosshairs. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The State Department referred Reason to comments by spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, who told reporters on Monday that “what people are looking at over these past several days is not a list that exists here or that is being acted on. There is a review, as we know, through the president’s executive order for us to look at the nature of what’s going to help keep America safer in dealing with the issue of visas and who’s allowed into the country.”
The Bhutanese, a local newspaper, reported after The New
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