Visa Revocations Disregard South Sudan War Risks, Overlook U.S. Communities’ Embrace of Refugees
Abstract
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Saturday that the State Department was acting to “revoke all visas held by South Sudanese passport holders and prevent further issuance to prevent entry into the United States by South Sudanese passport holders.” The rationale for this sweeping announcement is that the Transitional Government of South Sudan is not accepting the repatriation of its citizens from the United States “in a timely manner.”
For South Sudan and its citizens, the timing could hardly be worse. The country is on the brink of a renewed civil war, with little capacity to absorb returning citizens, who may well be at risk upon return. Moreover, given recent reporting about U.S. citizens being mistakenly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there is a non-trivial risk of South Sudanese with dual nationality, permanent residence, or asylum status being inadvertently swept up in the enforcement actions that will flow from this announcement.
The Trump administration may be in for more of a backlash than it expects. The breadth and depth of support for South Sudanese across red and blue states – and especially the longstanding commitment of the U.S. evangelical community to the people of South Sudan during their battle for independence from the Islamist Sudanese government – could generate enough pressure to force Rubio to withdraw, or at the very least, narrow the scope of the April 5 announcement.
Reporting the revocation, the New York Times drew an analogy to the high-profile dispute that President Donald Trump had in January with Colombian President Gustavo Petro over his refusal to accept flights of Colombian nationals deported from the United States. But that case, while also a form of high-stakes bullying, was meaningfully different, with visa restrictions applying specifically to Colombian officials and their families, on the grounds that they were “responsible for the interference of U.S. repatriation flight operations.” Here, the sanction of visa revocation appears to apply to all “South Sudanese passport holders.” In other words, the only criteria is nationality.
In targeting South Sudanese on the basis of their nationality, the administration appears to disregard – or not be aware of – the degree to which South Sudanese have become enmeshed in the fabric of the United States. South Sudan holds a unique position in terms of the degree to which Americans with no other ties to Africa are nonetheless familiar with this nascent nation. South Sudan’s independence from Sudan, won through a 2011 referendum, came after decades of carefully cultivated bipartisan U.S. support, with deep ties in the American evangelical movement.
Evangelist Reverend Franklin Graham’s humanitarian organization, Samaritan’s Purse, has been operating in South Sudan for more than 30 years. U.S. missionaries routinely spend extended periods in the country, bringing stories of South Sudanese back to their congregations. The legendary “Lost Boys and Girls” of South Sudan, thousands of whom were resettled in the United States, are embedded in communities across the country. South Sudanese diaspora fill the pews in churches from Alexandria to Omaha. And South Sudanese have made their mark on the American sports scene, including recently through Duke University basketball star and projected NBA lottery pick Khaman Maluach (who was playing in the Final Four when the revocation announcement came down). Many of these South Sudanese now have U.S. citizenship and will undoubtedly mobilize fellow Americans to decry Rubio’s announcement.