Neither Shaming nor Naming:  New Data on the Confidential Visa Bans under Section 7031(c)

By Adam Keith

In a December 2024 request, then-Senator Ben Cardin asked the State Department to share unclassified data with Congress on the confidential side of an important U.S. sanctions program – the Section 7031(c) requirement for visa bans related to corruption and human rights abuses.  The data provided in response to Cardin’s request offers a rare glimpse into how this program has been working behind the scenes.

Under Section 7031(c), Congress has generally required the State Department to bar foreign government officials and their immediate family members from entering the United States if there is “credible information” that the official was involved in either “a gross violation of human rights” or “significant corruption.”  The Department can impose these bans either publicly or confidentially, and it can waive the requirement in certain circumstances.

In a 2023 report, Human Rights First showed that confidential visa bans in general do little to support activists who are seeking accountability for abuse and corruption.  Because the bans are secret, they also frustrate public oversight of how the laws are being implemented.  To address some of these shortcomings, we recommended that the State Department release high-level statistics about the Section 7031(c) visa bans that it chooses to keep confidential.

The new State Department data is helpful in that respect.  It covers a four-year period (December 2020 to December 2024) that roughly aligns with the Biden administration.  Combining this new data on the confidential visa bans with already-available data about the bans that were public during that four-year period provides some insights on how Section 7031(c) has been implemented:

• The confidential visa bans were about a quarter of the total number of bans imposed.
• Visa bans based on human rights grounds were more likely to be kept confidential than the ones based on corruption.
• The more powerful regional bureaus within the State Department appear more likely to keep visa bans in their regions under wraps.
• The State Department used a waiver to avoid imposing a visa ban on a corrupt or abusive person about once for every eight bans that it allowed to take effect.
• Most of the potential cases that reached top U.S. officials for decision did result in visa bans, but how these cases are selected for consideration remains unclear.

These trends are discussed further below.  They may not hold for the second Trump term, being at least partly a function of the policies or preferences of Biden-era officials.  The Trump administration so far has not misused the Section 7031(c) program as it has other sanctions, though nearly all of its few public actions under this program have focused on Cuban officials.

Congress should build on Sen. Cardin’s one-off request by requiring the public disclosure of aggregate data about this program’s confidential visa bans on an annual basis, so that Congress and the broader public can monitor trends and perform oversight.  All the statistics in this post refer to visa bans under the Section 7031(c) program, not other visa-ban authorities.

Public versus confidential bans

There were far more public visa bans than confidential ones.  Over the four-year reporting period, the State Department imposed confidential visa bans on 119 individuals (90 for human rights violations and 29 for corruption), compared to 367 public visa bans.  That means that most of the actions taken under this program were public, but confidential bans still made up about a significant part of the total.

 The State Department was more likely to conceal visa bans linked to human rights violations than those linked to corruption.  The publicly visible visa bans during this period leaned heavily toward those based on corruption rather than human rights violations (68% and 32%, respectively).  But behind the scenes, the breakdown of the confidential visa bans was nearly the exact opposite, with individuals linked to corruption significantly outnumbered by those linked to human rights violations (24% and 76%).

Looked at another way, a visa ban issued on corruption grounds during this period was far more likely to be publicized than one on human rights grounds (90% versus 56%).  This could be because the State Department sees alleging human rights abuse as a more sensitive charge to make than corruption, and thus one it more often prefers to keep private.[i]

Regional patterns

Visa bans are far more likely to be kept confidential in certain regions.[ii]  Public bans were concentrated on individuals from the Western Hemisphere and Europe/Eurasia (37 and 29 percent of the total), and quite scarce in the East Asia/Pacific and Middle East/North Africa regions (6 and 5 percent).

Nearly the opposite was true behind the scenes, with the East Asia/Pacific and Middle East/North Africa regions holding the highest and third-highest shares of the confidential bans (26 and 21 percent).  While the visa bans from every other region were made public at rates above 70 percent, only 42 percent of those from these two regions were publicized.  This may be unsurprising, given that the State Department bureaus and embassies focused on those regions tend to be among the most bureaucratically powerful and least willing to upset relations over human rights or corruption issues – and thus most likely to successfully insist on keeping a measure targeting a foreign counterpart private.

The South/Central Asia region also saw relatively few public visa bans during the four-year reporting period (third to last).  But its share of the confidential visa bans was also quite low (the lowest of all regions), such that the public impression of low activity was consistent with the overall reality.

Waivers and exceptions

 The State Department overrode several visa bans with waivers, nearly all of them on the grounds of a “compelling national interest.”  There are four different kinds of waivers or exceptions the State Department can use if it does not want to impose a visa ban.  The new data shows that it issued waivers citing a “compelling national interest” 61 times during this period, all but one of which related to individuals involved in human rights abuse, not corruption.

Despite this data, it is difficult to say how many of the visa bans imposed during this period were negated by waivers.  We understand that in some cases, a single individual making multiple visits accounts for several of the waivers; and that some waivers applied to visa bans that had been imposed prior to the reporting period.  Still, waiving roughly an eighth of the number of visa bans imposed during this period is significant, and presumably corresponds to dozens of official visits by individuals the State Department found to be corrupt or abusive.

Under a second exception, the State Department also reported 10 occasions of allowing an otherwise banned person to travel to the United Nations in New York during this period.  Allowing these visits is and should generally be outside of U.S. discretion, given U.S. obligations as the host country under the UN headquarters agreement.  The two other exceptions or waivers available went unused: the State Department did not invoke the exception for visits that would serve “important law enforcement objectives,” nor did it lift any ban by citing a change in the circumstances that caused it.

How the decisions are made

While Congress receives classified notifications about all confidential visa bans and waivers, the details remain unclear to the public.  As an example of how this can play out, in January 2024 Human Rights First publicly sought to trigger a visa ban on Bahrain’s Prince Nasser by submitting information about allegations that he personally tortured prisoners, a gross violation of human rights.  It is unclear from Nasser’s subsequent July 2024 visit for meetings in Washington and a conference in Colorado if the State Department found the evidence against him not to be credible, or found it credible but gave him a waiver, or simply did not review our submission.

Most of the cases proposed to State Department leadership for review appear to have led to visa bans, though it remains unclear how those cases were identified.  The new data indicates that the State Department reviewed a total of 245 cases during this period for possible visa bans under Section 7031(c).  We understand this does not include every foreign official who was assessed by anyone on the State Department’s staff, but rather only those who were formally presented for review and decision by the top officials who have authority to issue visa bans under this program.  It also does not include family members considered for visa bans along with their allegedly corrupt or abusive relative – only the official themselves.

In turn, available data suggests that a very large share of the 245 officials who faced such review were, in fact, banned from entry.  We know that 204 officials had public visa bans imposed against them during this period, and that some unknown additional number of the reported confidential visa bans also applied to officials.

It remains unclear, though, how decisions are made about which cases get presented to Department leaders; how many potential cases were reviewed at lower levels by staff; or whether the procedures by which those cases come to the staff’s attention in the first place are sufficient.

U.S. officials have told us that the longstanding provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act focused on torture and extrajudicial killings (section 212(a)(3)(E)(3)), and the lack of a comparable provision relevant to corruption, increases the relative likelihood of scrutiny for alleged human rights violators.  The INA provision has for many years incentivized U.S. consular officers to enter a “hit” into a consular database when they find relevant derogatory information on a person.  Such a hit, in turn, creates a linkage between the person’s alleged conduct and their travel plans when that person later applies for a visa – forcing a review against Section 7031(c)’s standards in a more systematic manner than a person involved in corruption will likely face.

Further information

 The State Department’s response to Sen. Cardin’s request and a Human Rights First spreadsheet with key calculations and some methodological notes is linked here.

[i] Our past analyses have sometimes focused on a different metric, omitting the visa bans that were imposed on a corrupt or abusive official’s family members and counting only the “primary” bans focused on the officials themselves.  That approach reduces this program’s apparent emphasis on corrupt actors over abusive ones, because the State Department has tended to exclude more family members when the targeted official is corrupt rather than abusive.  But the data about confidential visa bans does not distinguish between primary bans and family members, making it impossible to compare the public and private bans on this basis.

[ii] The State Department’s six regional divisions and corresponding bureaus are the Western Hemisphere; Europe and Eurasia; South and Central Asia; the Near East, i.e., Middle East and North Africa; Africa; and East Asia and the Pacific.