The Trump administration is considering a significant expansion of its current travel ban — which now restricts or blocks entry from 19 countries — to approximately 30 nations following last week’s fatal shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., multiple U.S. officials told CBS News on Tuesday.
Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said the plans are still in the early stages and the final number of countries could shift. Earlier Tuesday, CNN reported that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was recommending expanding the list to between 30 and 32 countries.
After meeting with President Trump on Monday, Noem wrote 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,” she added in her post.
The administration has pointed to the Washington attack — allegedly carried out by an Afghan man who arrived in the U.S. in September 2021 and was granted asylum in April 2025 — as justification for intensifying its broader immigration crackdown. Officials have already halted all visa and immigration processing for Afghan nationals, paused asylum decisions for all nationalities, and ordered a comprehensive review of green card applications involving immigrants from the 19 countries currently subject to the travel ban.
Investigators are still working to determine what motivated the suspected gunman.
If implemented, the new measures would substantially widen the reach of a proclamation issued by President Trump earlier this year, which partially or fully blocked legal immigration and travel from 19 countries, most of them in Asia and Africa.
That proclamation — frequently referred to as a travel ban by both supporters and critics — imposed near-total entry restrictions on people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. It also placed partial limits on travelers and immigrants from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
At the time, Trump said the measure was necessary due to concerns about terrorist activity in some of the listed countries, gaps in the vetting of certain nationals and the refusal of some governments to cooperate with U.S. deportation efforts.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said it would announce the additional countries to be included in the travel ban “soon.”
