More than three months after the Trump administration’s second travel ban on Yemen, officials in the Metro Detroit Yemeni community said it is discriminatory, spreading fear and sparking logistical problems for those with ties to the region.
The measure announced on June 5 took effect four days later and targets 12 other countries that are mainly African, Middle Eastern and majority-Muslim.
“It has been a constant, constant, constant suffering all these years,” said Abdulhakem Alsadah, a member of the Dearborn-based National Association of Yemeni Americans. “And now we are faced with a new challenge, which is the ban.”
Metro Detroit activists and community members said they are reminded of the Trump administration’s first travel ban in 2017, often referred to as “the Muslim ban,” and that the impacts in the Yemeni community are already evident. They also believe Trump’s bans have been selective in the identities they target.
The ban is about “profiling and targeting certain people based on their ethnicity and their faith and the color of their skin,” said U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit.
The Trump administration contends the measure is necessary.
“To protect the national security and national interests of the United States and the American people, the President issued a proclamation on June 4, 2025,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email to The Detroit News.
“The proclamation suspends or limits entry to the United States and issuance of U.S. visas to foreign nationals from specified countries due to those countries’ inadequate vetting and security screening processes, information-sharing practices, exploitation of our visa system and failure to accept the return of removed nationals, and identity management protocols, subject to certain categorical exceptions and case-by-case waivers.”
Besides Yemen, the proclamation is directed at Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.
Trump has said nationals of countries included in the ban pose “terrorism-related” and “public-safety” risks, as well as risks of overstaying their visas.
Metro Detroit contains the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Middle East. Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 12th Congressional District, including Detroit, Dearborn and Southfield, said the largest growing number of immigrants in her district are from Yemen.
She referred to the 2025 order, which fully restricts the entry of individuals from Yemen, as the “racist travel ban” and called it “devastating” to families who have been putting time and resources into applications.
While the ban doesn’t apply to green card holders or those with valid visas, and people with certain family petitions can move forward with their application, many cases have been put in administrative review since the last presidential administration and residents worry that circumstances could worsen, Tlaib said.
“Many of our communities haven’t waited, like months or weeks, but we’re talking about years of trying to bring their families to reunite with their families because of the humanitarian crisis, one of the worst in our history, in our world, it’s in Yemen,” Tlaib said. “People are still suffering from access to food, medical needs … and I want to reiterate, these are family petitions.”
After years of war, Yemen remains one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the United Nations Population Fund reported in April. Around 19.5 million people, which is more than half of the country’s population, require some form of humanitarian assistance. The country also faces one of the world’s most severe hunger crises, with more than half of the population struggling to access food.
Airstrikes on critical civilian infrastructure in Yemen, including the Sana’a International Airport and the Hodeidah Port, have further exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and ability of aid to be delivered, the International Rescue Committee said.
Last week, Israel launched airstrikes on Hodeida as Iranian-backed Houthi rebels activated air defenses. The Israeli military said in an update that it struck “military infrastructure” used by the Houthis at Hodeida port. A Houthi spokesman said Houthi air defenses “caused great confusion” for Israeli aircraft and forced some combat formations to leave Yemeni airspace before carrying out the attacks, thwarting Israel’s incursion deep into Yemen.
The number of Yemeni immigrants to Michigan has been increasing, said Alsadah, whose service organization provides social, educational and immigration services to the community. Coupled with the unfolding of a conflict between the U.S., Israel and Houthi militia group that has already left hundreds of civilians dead since 2024, the scramble to escape, especially for those with relatives living in the U.S., is more dire, Alsadah said.
“The fact of the matter is: every time there is a ban, it really affects the whole entire process,” Alsadah said, adding that immigration officers “scrutinize documentation, they scrutinize information. They delay the process for legal migration, for family reunification, and then the process takes twice as much, three times as much as it would in normal circumstances.”
Wali Altahif, a regional Yemeni activist, said the visa approval process for Yemenis takes much longer than it does for others, effectively delaying family reunification for years. His wife moved to the U.S. in 2024 after waiting five years for her visa to be approved.
Altahif said he and his wife traveled to the Yemeni embassy in Egypt twice, only to be transferred to Djibouti. “It was a nightmare,” he said.
“In many aspects, I mean, you are separating families. You are separating spouses. You are separating children from their parents, and that leads to a lot of stress, a lot of trauma, a lot of psychological issues and a lot of economic hardship,” Altahif said. “Your whole life is on hold waiting for your loved one to be reunited.”
Ahead of the ban, the Trump administration said the aim is to “protect its citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.”
Federal officials told The Detroit News the secretary of state, in consultation with the attorney general, secretary of Homeland Security, and director of national intelligence, “determined that a number of countries were deficient with regard to screening and vetting information and that the unrestricted entry of its nationals would be detrimental to U.S. national interests.”
Officials said Trump “determined that the unrestricted entry of nationals from the specified countries would be detrimental to the interests of the United States” after evaluating a report submitted by the Secretary of State.
The department’s statement added: “The Department of State is committed to protecting our nation and its citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”
In June, the State Department instructed U.S. embassies and consulates not to revoke visas previously issued to people from the countries listed in the ban.
The ban does not affect the ability of U.S. citizens to travel to and from Yemen, Tlaib said, but families should still be prepared for “long waits, interviews and an interrogation and illegal detainments.” Legal permanent residents should still speak to an attorney before they travel.
Many also said it is important to consider that there is no American embassy in Yemen, meaning any Yemeni who wants to do business with the American embassy will have to travel at least hundreds of miles to a different country.
Families will typically spend months there during the immigration process and pay out of pocket for basic necessities, such as housing, food and travel, and take a leave of absence from their jobs, Alsadah said.
“Now that means if you want to bring your spouse with your two, three, four or five kids … you need to take your spouse to go to Djibouti, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey or Malaysia,” Alsadah said. “All these countries are receiving thousands of Yemenis just to go do business with the American embassy because there is no consulate.”
Some in the Yemeni-American community said they believe they have been forsaken by both major political parties in the U.S. as the situation unfolds.
In Hamtramck, a city with large Yemeni and Muslim populations, Trump visited less than a month before the 2024 presidential election and obtained the endorsement of the city’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, and several other community and religious leaders. Ghalib announced that it was Trump’s goal “to end the chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere.”
Trump visited Dearborn, considered the nation’s largest majority-Arab American city, days before the election and told crowds at one point: “You’re going to have peace in the Middle East.”
“The truth is, a small minority of Yemeni Americans voted for Trump. The media made more noise about it than actually was true,” Alsadah said. “It should not be held against the community. There is no cohesive voting block in the Arab community. That’s a myth.”
Altahif referenced the war in Yemen, saying he believes the actions of Houthi rebels in Yemen are being used as collective punishment against civilians and those looking to travel to the U.S.
The Houthis, a militia the U.S. considers to be Iran-backed that controls much of Yemen, since November 2023 have been attacking ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden that they say are tied to Israel as support for Palestinians in Gaza. The waterway facilitates the transfer of $1 trillion in goods annually, along with 30% of the world’s container traffic, and the Houthis’ actions have significantly disrupted international shipping and caused increased costs and delays.
The attacks are represented as a challenge to what the U.S. has defined as “a core national interest,” and on March 15, Trump launched a military campaign against the Houthis that then officially ended on May 6, when he announced a truce.
“The community became the scapegoat for the original conflict in Yemen. Yemeni Americans are paying the price for it,” Altahif said.
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