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.
Suspect Logic
Beyond the potential for a domestic backlash, the purported rationale for the revocation fails even on its own suspect logic.
To begin with, most South Sudanese – whether on visas in the United States, or located elsewhere in the world, including in South Sudan itself – have little influence over their government’s decision-making regarding the repatriation of nationals or literally anything else. Soon after achieving independence, South Sudan’s leaders, President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar, dragged the country into a brutal civil war, estimated to have cost close to 400,000 lives. A shaky peace agreement paused the fighting in 2018, but because of the war, and slow-rolling by Kiir and the officials around him, the country has never had an election. For some South Sudanese, joining a rebellion, rather than going to the polls, is seen as the primary means to influence the leadership.
The peace agreement loosely holding the country together is now on the brink of collapse, making this a terrible moment for indiscriminately repatriating citizens. Competition between Kiir and Machar is the central drama in South Sudanese politics, which triggered the first civil war and threatens to do so again. Kiir recently placed Machar under house arrest, after forces historically aligned with Machar attacked army components controlled by Kiir.
All the while, South Sudanese citizens struggle in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable. The United Nations projects that close to 70 percent of South Sudan’s population of just over 13 million people requires some form of humanitarian assistance, with 6.4 million people classified as severely food-insecure and more than 2 million children under 5 at risk of acute malnutrition. The civil war and other factors have forced approximately 2.3 million South Sudanese to flee to other countries, and displaced 2 million more within the country. At the same time, the civil war in neighboring Sudan has forced more than 640,000 South Sudanese living there to return to South Sudan, placing a further strain on scarce resources.
South Sudan’s economy, already in shambles, suffered a further blow when a portion of a pipeline carrying South Sudanese oil (the country’s primary revenue source) through Sudan was damaged amidst Sudan’s civil war. The economy also depends on remittances from South Sudanese living abroad, including in the United States. As Kiir has grown increasingly authoritarian, basic rights and freedoms are routinely trampled upon by the South Sudanese government, compelling some South Sudanese to flee the country in search of safety (Freedom House rates South Sudan as a 1 on a 100 point scale, rendering it one of the least free countries in the world).
Temporary Protected Status
The U.S. government itself has understood the extremely difficult conditions in South Sudan for some time, having already granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to South Sudanese. TPS is granted to individuals in the United States “who are unable to return home safely due to conditions or circumstances preventing their country from adequately handling the return.” The designation is made by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the current designation listing South Sudan nationals as eligible for TPS runs until May 3 this year.
There are currently 155 South Sudanese in the United States with TPS, with a further 280 eligible to apply. While there has been no public determination by the secretary of homeland security regarding an extension of TPS for South Sudanese, Rubio’s announcement presumably means DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is planning to terminate their TPS. As of publication, however, no such decision has been published in the Federal Register (compare, for example, Noem’s termination of TPS for Venezuelan nationals, published two months in advance of the expiration date of their status.)
The Trump administration’s rationale for the collective punishment of an entire population on account of their government’s refusal to accept repatriated citizens is hard to fathom. Perhaps the target is influential people around Kiir and in the upper levels of his government, some of whom have U.S. visas themselves, or have family in the United States, and could convince Kiir to reverse course. If so, a more targeted visa ban, as in the Colombia case, could have achieved that outcome. Perhaps the administration thinks that South Sudanese in the country and throughout the diaspora will pressure Kiir to accept returnees – but if Kiir listened to that sort of citizen lobbying, he would have acceded to citizens’ demands for peace over war a long time ago.
In announcing the visa revocation, Rubio asserted that “it is time for the Transitional Government of South Sudan to stop taking advantage of the United States.” The South Sudanese government is divided and autocratic, but its harms are inflicted primarily on its own people. Moreover, Rubio’s assertion fundamentally distorts the nature of the relationship between the two countries. South Sudanese were able to realize their right to self-determination – and voted to become an independent country – with American support, which was underpinned by domestic lobbying, especially from a robust evangelical coalition. And the United States has benefitted too, through the talent, dynamism, values and determination of the South Sudanese living and working in American communities. Pinning an autocratic government’s decisions on them is illogical, unjust, and ignores the myriad contributions they’ve made.