Trump says US will pause migration from 'third-world countries'

Donald Trump has said he will “permanently pause migration” to the US from all “third world countries”.

The US president wrote in a Truth Social post that this would “allow the US system to fully recover” from policies that had eroded the “gains and living conditions” of many Americans. He did not provide details of his plan or name which countries might be affected.

His comments came a day after an Afghan national was accused of shooting two members of the National Guard in Washington DC, one of whom has died. Trump suggested the incident underlined a major national security threat.

The president’s subsequent announcements represent a further toughening of his stance on immigration.

In the wake of the shooting, he promised to remove from the US any foreigner “from any country who does not belong here”. The same day, the US suspended processing all immigration requests from Afghans, saying the decision was made pending a review of “security and vetting protocols”.

Then on Thursday, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said it would re-examine green cards issued to individuals who had migrated to the US from 19 countries. The announcement did not explicitly mention Wednesday’s attack.

When asked by the BBC which countries were on the list, the agency pointed to a June proclamation by the White House that included Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Somalia and Venezuela.

There were no further details about what the re-examination would look like.

Trump’s strongly worded two-part post on Thursday night went further, pledging to “end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens”.

In the post, the president also blamed refugees for causing the “social dysfunction in America” and vowed to remove “anyone who is not a net asset” to the US.

The post, which Trump introduced as a “Happy Thanksgiving salutation”, was filled with anti-immigrant language.

He said that “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia were completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota” and took particular aim at the state’s Democratic lawmakers.

“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover,” the president wrote.

The phrase “third world” is a term that was used in the past to describe poorer, developing nations.

The White House and USCIS have not yet given further details of Trump’s plan, which Trump did not directly link in his post to Wednesday’s attack.

The president had already imposed a travel ban on nationals of Afghanistan – and 11 other countries, primarily in Africa and Asia – earlier this year. Another travel ban targeting a number of majority-Muslim countries was enacted during his first term.

The Trump response to Wednesday’s shooting amounted to a “scapegoating” of migrants in the US, argued Jeremy McKinney, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Speaking to the BBC World Service’s Newsday programme before Trump’s latest comments, Mr McKinney highlighted that the attacker’s motive was not known. “These types of issues – they don’t know skin colour, they don’t know nationality,” he said. “When a person becomes radicalised or is suffering some type of mental illness, that person can come from any background.”

The flurry of announcements come after officials said that the suspect in the Washington DC shooting, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, had come to the US in 2021.

Mr Lakanwal travelled under a programme that offered special immigration protections to Afghans who had worked with US forces in the wake of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

At the time, the Taliban had taken back control of Afghanistan, raising fears of retribution against those who had co-operated with the US. Mr Lakanwal once worked alongside the CIA, the agency’s current director has said.

Mr Lakanwal applied for asylum in 2024 and his application was granted earlier this year, an official told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

He was arrested after the attack and was said to be not co-operating with authorities.

Trump styled the attack as an “act of terror”.

He said the following day that one of the two members of the National Guard who were shot had died.

Sarah Beckstrom succumbed to her injuries, he said. The 20-year-old from West Virginia was working in the city as part of Trump’s deployment of National Guard members to crack down on crime.

She had volunteered to work in DC over the US Thanksgiving holiday, Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

The second National Guard member, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, was said by Trump to be “fighting for his life”.

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