A Burmese American woman was eager to bring her siblings over to the U.S. from Myanmar amid a more than 15-year wait for visas. She’d been hoping to reunite with them since the 1990s, during military rule in her home country, so her brother’s family could start a life in the U.S. But a day after she bought the plane tickets, President Donald Trump ordered a travel ban that included Myanmar.
The woman, 51, and her husband, who were granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, had sponsored her brother and sister-in-law to immigrate to the U.S. The siblings were then were hoping to bring their own adult kids, too, so that they wouldn’t have to fulfill mandatory military service in the country’s active civil war.
With the travel ban in effect Monday, they said the policy has a heightened impact on people from war-torn countries like Myanmar who had hopes of finding sanctuary in the U.S.
“It’s really frustrating because we were on the cusp of securing their safety to leave that situation,” said her husband, 57, adding he felt like a “rug got pulled out from under us in an instant.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump’s policy is in the “best interest of the American people and their safety.”
“His commonsense, country-specific travel restrictions include places that lack proper vetting, exhibit high visa overstay rates, or fail to share identity and threat information,” Jackson said. “The restrictions fulfill the President’s day one promise to protect American citizens from dangerous foreign actors who may come to the United States and cause us harm.”
The travel restrictions, announced on Wednesday, completely bar entry to the U.S. for people from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, in addition to those from Afghanistan, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Other countries, including Cuba, Laos and Venezuela, are under partial travel restrictions.
According to Trump’s proclamation, several of the countries on the list had declined to accept the repatriation of their nationals while others had visa overstay rates that the administration deemed “unacceptable.” A few countries lacked “the competence of the central authority” for issuing passports, the proclamation said.
Jackson also pointed out a section in the proclamation that allows for applications for refugee status.
“Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to limit the ability of an individual to seek asylum, refugee status, withholding of removal, or protection under the [international Convention Against Torture], consistent with the laws of the United States,” the proclamation said.
However, after he took office, Trump limited refugee admissions for almost all countries including Myanmar. And in May, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants that was granted by the Biden administration. Those immigrants came from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and are now subject to deportation.
Myanmar was among the nine countries in the latest proclamation that Trump also targeted during his first term. In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. issued 13,284 visas to the country, with business and tourism permits making up the most common types of visas. Myanmar recorded 1,384 overstays that fiscal year, equating to an overstay rate of almost 30%.
The new travel ban comes as Myanmar’s violent military regime fights to hold on to power after it seized control from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in a 2021 coup. Since then, violence has escalated across the region as the military clashes with ethnic minority rebel groups and pro-democracy militias.
“Junta forces have slaughtered thousands of civilians, bombed and burned villages, and displaced millions of people,” Tom Andrews, United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, said in a press release earlier this year. “More than 20,000 political prisoners remain behind bars. The economy and public services have collapsed. Famine and starvation loom over large parts of the population.”
Under the new travel ban, anyone who obtained a visa prior to the policy is still able to come to the U.S. But there’s confusion over how the restrictions will be implemented and enforced. The Burmese American woman and her husband are among those with concerns, particularly as there have been several cases of lawful permanent residents and citizens being swept up in the dragnet of Trump’s immigration policies.
“It’s terrifying to think that they could be randomly picked up because somebody had a bad day at the office, or somebody didn’t do their job or didn’t believe that their visa was true,” the woman’s husband said. “It’s quite frankly terrifying.”
For the woman, reunification with her brother has been a long time coming. She became a citizen in the late 1990s and began the process to help bring her sibling over a few years later. At the time, Myanmar had been under the control of a strict military junta that held power from the 1960s until 2011, and for decades had kept the country in a state of extreme isolation and deprivation. She said her brother, whose children were just a few years old then, hoped to come over and root his family in more stability.
“Their circumstances in Myanmar at that time were very, very bad. That was the system that I grew up in. There was no future for them, no prosperity,” the woman said. “My brother was concerned for his children’s future and education.”
Amid moves and address changes, the couple said they never received the standard letter notifying them that the woman’s brother had been able to progress in his visa process. They assumed the wait was a product of notorious immigration backlogs. It wasn’t until the situation in Myanmar intensified again in recent years that the couple found out that the brother was close to finally being able to immigrate. But by then, the woman said, her brother’s kids had aged out of the system.
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, those who turn 21 before being approved for legal permanent resident status are no longer considered a child for immigration purposes and need to file an entirely new application, prolonging the green card process.
At this point, the woman said, her brother and sister-in-law said they were willing to risk possible detention to come to the U.S., particularly if it meant easier access to the American immigration system that would enable them to fight to get their children to come over as well. However, with Myanmar’s military draft in effect, the family is particularly concerned for their safety now that the travel ban adds another barrier to leaving.
“The reason they wanted to come here was for their kids,” the woman said of her brother and sister-in-law. “Now, it’s really hard to bring my nephews here to save their lives.”
Quyen Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, said the bans are ultimately another part of “the engine of Trump’s mass deportation machine.”
“It’s focused on demonizing immigrant families and communities by denying them family reunification, that we all rightfully deserve to be whole — especially now, when the world is more dangerous than ever,” Dinh said.
Rather than protecting individuals’ safety, Dinh said, she believes Trump’s policy punishes those who need an escape from dangerous conditions.
“It perpetuates the violence that is happening across the world, as opposed to creating conditions for peace or humanitarian relief, and for these families who’ve been separated,” Dinh said.
She also said she views the ban as evidence that the U.S. is misunderstanding its role as a humanitarian leader.
“We’ve got people who are legitimately trying to escape a civil war,” the woman’s husband said. “Now, because of some arbitrary decision by the Trump administration to pick a certain number of countries … without consideration of the actual cases, without an exception policy, it hurts them. They’ve done nothing wrong.”
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