Kristi Noem pushes a ‘full travel ban’ in wake of DC shooting

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seizing on the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington—using the tragedy to push for a sweeping new travel ban that goes well beyond anything the administration has floated publicly.

She rolled out the idea Monday night on X, casting it as the product of a conversation she’d just had with President Donald Trump.

“I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she wrote. “Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

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The post gestures back to Trump’s first-term travel ban—a bruising legal saga that began with a chaotic rollout targeting seven Muslim-majority countries and ended, after several rewrites, with a Supreme Court seal of approval in 2018. The bans were for Muslim-majority countries Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia—and added a ban on travelers from North Korea and government officials from Venezuela.

What Noem didn’t offer this time was any roadmap. She didn’t name the countries she wants blocked or explain the criteria for choosing them. A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to Daily Kos’ request for comment.

It’s also unclear what, exactly, Trump has signed off on. He reposted Noem’s message on Truth Social during a sprawling late-night posting binge—more than 150 posts in a few hours—without adding an explanation of his own.

Noem’s language, casting immigrants as “foreign invaders,” lands at a moment when the White House is tightening legal pathways in the wake of last week’s killing. Authorities say the gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who arrived in 2021 as part of the Biden-era resettlement effort and was granted asylum earlier this year under the Trump administration. Afghanistan is already among the 12 countries barred under the travel ban Trump issued in June.

Trump, for his part, has only sharpened his rhetoric since the killing. On Thanksgiving, he promised to “permanently pause migration from all third-world countries” and floated something he called “reverse migration”—a phrase that appeared to endorse stripping citizenship from foreign nationals and deporting those he deems “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

By Sunday, he was telling reporters he intended to halt asylum claims “for a long time” because “we don’t want those people.”

The White House is openly embracing Noem’s proposal. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News on Monday night that Trump backed broadening the ban.

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“Several months ago, he announced a travel ban on 19 third-world and failed state countries around the world,” she said. “Secretary Noem announced tonight she is recommending that travel ban widen and cover more countries around the globe.”

“Coming to the United States of America is a privilege, it is not a right,” Leavitt added. “If you abuse that privilege, and if you don’t align with the values of the United States, and you don’t respect our country, our culture, our laws, and our people, you are not welcome here.”

The administration also launched a review of “all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration,” though DHS hasn’t clarified whether the sweep is limited to Afghan cases or applies to cases across nationalities.

The policy landscape here is already massive. Trump’s June travel ban already blocks entry from 12 countries—most in Africa and the Middle East—and imposes partial restrictions on seven more. Immigrant-rights groups have filed a thicket of lawsuits. 

And the memory of the 2017 ban still hangs over the debate: the airport chaos and subsequent detentions, the rapid-fire injunctions, and the eventual Supreme Court sign-off on a heavily revised text.

Viewed through that history, Noem’s newest push isn’t exactly a surprise. It’s a familiar pattern in Trump-era governing: tragedy as catalyst, crisis as justification, and a sweeping policy response that reaches far past the facts of the case and into the administration’s longest-held ambitions.

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