The United States has announced that it is halting all visitor visas for people from Gaza pending a “a full and thorough” review, a day after social media posts about Palestinian refugees sparked furious reactions from right-wingers.
The Department of State’s move on Saturday came a day after far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer posted on X that Palestinians “who claim to be refugees from Gaza” entered the US via San Francisco and Houston this month.
“How is allowing for Islamic immigrants to come into the US America First policy?” she said on X in a later post, going on to report further Palestinian arrivals in Missouri and claiming that “several US Senators and members of Congress” had texted her to express their fury.
Republican lawmakers speaking publicly about the matter included Chip Roy of Texas, who said he would inquire about the matter, and Randy Fine of Florida, who described the alleged arrivals as a “national security risk”.
By Saturday, the State Department announced it was stopping visas for “individuals from Gaza” while it conducted “a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days”. It did not provide a figure.
The US issued 640 visas to holders of the Palestinian Authority travel document in May, according to the Reuters news agency. B1/B2 visitor visas permit Palestinians to seek medical treatment in the US.
Loomer greeted Saturday’s State Department announcement with glee.
“It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” she said on Saturday, though she later posted that more needed to be done to “highlight the crisis of the invasion happening in our country”.
The decision to cut visas comes as Israel intensifies its attacks on Gaza, where at least 61,827 people have been killed in the past 22 months, with the United Nations warning that “widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease” are driving a rise in famine-related deaths.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing to seize Gaza City as part of a takeover of the Strip, forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to concentration zones.
