WASHINGTON (AP) — A day after conservative activist Laura Loomer posted videos on social media of children from Gaza arriving in the U.S. for medical treatment and questioning how they got visas, the State Department said it was halting all visitor visas for people from Gaza pending a review.
The State Department said Saturday the visas would be stopped while it looks into how “a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas” were issued in recent days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday told “Face the Nation” on CBS that the action came after ”outreach from multiple congressional offices asking questions about it.”
Rubio said there were “just a small number” of the visas issued to children in need of medical aid but that they were accompanied by adults. The congressional offices reached out with evidence that “some of the organizations bragging about and involved in acquiring these visas have strong links to terrorist groups like Hamas,” he asserted, without providing evidence or naming those organizations.
As a result, he said, “we are going to pause this program and reevaluate how those visas are being vetted and what relationship, if any, has there been by these organizations to the process of acquiring those visas.”
Loomer on Friday posted videos on X of children from Gaza arriving earlier this month in San Francisco and Houston for medical treatment with the aid of an organization called HEAL Palestine. “Despite the US saying we are not accepting Palestinian ‘refugees’ into the United States under the Trump administration,” these people from Gaza were able to travel to the U.S., she said.
She called it a “national security threat” and asked who signed off on the visas, calling for the person to be fired. She tagged Rubio, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.
Trump has downplayed Loomer’s influence on his administration, but several officials swiftly left or were removed shortly after she publicly criticized them.
The State Department on Sunday declined to comment on how many of the visas had been granted and whether the decision to halt visas to people from Gaza had anything to do with Loomer’s posts.
HEAL Palestine said in a statement Sunday that it was “distressed” by the State Department decision to stop halt visitor visas from Gaza. The group said it is “an American humanitarian nonprofit organization delivering urgent aid and medical care to children in Palestine.”
A post on the organization’s Facebook page Thursday shows a photo of a boy from Gaza leaving Egypt and headed to St. Louis for treatment and said he is “our 15th evacuated child arriving in the U.S. in the last two weeks.”
The organization brings “severely injured children” to the U.S. on temporary visas for treatment they can’t get at home, the statement said. Following treatment, the children and any family members who accompanied them return to the Middle East, the statement said.
“This is a medical treatment program, not a refugee resettlement program,” it said.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly called for more medical evacuations from Gaza, where Israel’s over 22-month war against Hamas has heavily destroyed or damaged much of the territory’s health system.
“More than 14,800 patients still need lifesaving medical care that is not available in Gaza,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday on social media, and called on more countries to offer support.
A WHO description of the medical evacuation process from Gaza published last year explained that the WHO submits lists of patients to Israeli authorities for security clearance. It noted that before the war in Gaza began, 50 to 100 patients were leaving Gaza daily for medical treatment, and it called for a higher rate of approvals from Israeli authorities.
The U.N. and partners say medicines and even basic health care supplies are low in Gaza after Israel cut off all aid to the territory of over 2 million people for more than 10 weeks earlier this year.
“Ceasefire! Peace is the best medicine,” Tedros added Wednesday.
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