President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly “weaponized” a power cloaked in secrecy to punish his critics and prop up corrupt power brokers, according to a new report.
Trump’s government has been revoking the visas of foreign leaders, judges and journalists while quietly reinstating those of like-minded allies, the New York Times reported Sunday.
“No recent American administration ever did this kind of open attack on freedom of expression” said John Feeley, a career diplomat. “A congressman or a prosecutor without a U.S. visa…is somebody who is flying with a broken wing.”
Past State departments have also revoked visas but mostly to keep security threats out of the country or fight corruption, the Times reported.
It is difficult to quantify the tactic as visa records are confidential, but the State Department said in a statement to the Times that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials have “broad discretionary authority” to cancel visas “whenever and wherever.”
Johana Obando, a Costa Rican lawmaker whose personal and diplomatic visas were canceled, said she felt like the Trump administration was sending her a message.
“It is a way of intimidating decision makers to benefit the United States,” she said.
The Trump administration also rewards others whom critics say it should not.
“Corruption, human rights violations or judicial interference no longer matter,” Ana María Méndez Dardón, of the rights group Washington Office on Latin America, told the Times.
At least three senior Salvadoran officials whom former President Joe Biden considered too corrupt or anti-democratic to earn visas have benefited, according to the report.
“Visa revocations have also been used to suppress criticism of the Trump administration, or even of U.S.-aligned foreign leaders,” the report stated. “In Panama, for example, after two politicians criticized a sweeping security pact between their country and the United States, they were notified that their U.S. visas had been revoked.”
The post Trump caught quietly weaponizing secret power in ‘open attack on freedom’: report appeared first on Raw Story.
