Middle East Studies Association
MESA Joint Statement of the Board, Task Force on Civil and Human Rights and Committee on Academic Freedom concerning 2025 Travel Bans
We write to follow up on our June 16 Advisory concerning the latest iteration of the Trump administration’s travel bans, which were first announced on June 4, 2025. Since that time, the government has imposed an additional travel ban on those traveling on a Palestinian Authority passport and all persons applying for visitor visas from Gaza. As we wrote in our earlier advisory, we decry and condemn in the strongest possible terms these measures, which use national origin as a loose proxy for race and religion, and advance discriminatory goals in restricting travel to the U.S. We are particularly dismayed at the gratuitous cruelty with which the government has canceled visas for medical evacuees from Gaza, including Palestinian children scheduled to travel to the United States for reconstructive surgeries to address catastrophic injuries they have sustained as a consequence of Israeli attacks.
We noted in June that MESA was exploring options to pursue a legal challenge against these new travel bans, as we did against the 2017 Muslim Travel Ban. Due to the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Trump v. Hawaii that upheld the 2017 travel ban, we have determined for the moment that there is no clear path for litigation, based on conversations with partner organizations focused on civil rights and immigrants’ rights. We continue to believe that the Supreme Court decision in that case was profoundly misguided, distorting constitutional protections against racial and religious discrimination—allowing the administration to impose arbitrary restrictions, unfairly targeting Muslim and Middle Eastern communities, by pretextually invoking “national security.” Like the 2017 Muslim Travel Ban, so too the travel bans imposed in 2025 harm our members by disrupting travel, research, scholarship, educational opportunities, and the free exchange of ideas with those based in the countries directly affected by the ban.
The travel bans have upended applications for admission to U.S. universities at the undergraduate and graduate levels from affected countries. They have also had an adverse effect on the continuing education of international students already enrolled in U.S. degree programs who traveled outside of the U.S. over the summer. In the last academic year, the State Department reportedly issued over 5,700 F-1 and J-1 visas to foreign students and researchers from countries now affected by the travel ban. Of these, more than half were visas issued to citizens of Iran and Myanmar. The loss of a substantial number of Iranian students and scholars, now barred from study and research in the U.S., is keenly felt by MESA members.
Beyond the travel bans, the summer brought more unwelcome news when the Trump administration directed all consulates to suspend student visa processing while introducing new criteria for vetting applications based on social media usage. Thousands of students were left in limbo, with those who had secured visa interviews finding their appointments canceled. Even after visa processing resumed, backlogs and slow operations have left untold numbers of international students admitted to colleges and universities in the U.S. unable to obtain visas in time for the start of the academic year. For an additional cohort of students, the ongoing immigration crackdowns in the U.S. and the revocation of some students’ visas last year have led to second thoughts about American higher education. The predictable consequence has been substantial declines in international student enrollments across the U.S. at the beginning of this academic year.
Overall, the travel bans issued by the Trump administration this year are concentrated on the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, and in the case of the MENA region the six countries directly impacted account for nearly half the population of the region. Moreover, because the MENA region and the Muslim world are disproportionately targeted by travel restrictions, the bans themselves and their political repercussions have harmed study, research, and scholarship in our field by impeding scholarly exchanges and exacerbating tensions that make access to field sites and archives that much more difficult.
MESA remains committed to preserving our collegial and academic networks with students and scholars now excluded from the U.S. We recognize that the citizens of countries and regions affected by these travel restrictions have in many cases already suffered enormous violence and dispossession as a consequence of U.S. policies, including financial and military assistance to belligerents across a range of conflicts in the MENA region as well as the Trump administration’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
The Middle East studies academic community has both a professional and an ethical responsibility to defend the rights of our students and colleagues who are now being harmed by arbitrary and discriminatory bans on their travel. We will continue to explore all avenues to support affected students and colleagues, including by voicing our opposition to these bans, documenting their adverse impact on our scholarly networks, and developing innovative means of continuing scholarly exchanges with affected communities. We are currently in the planning phase to convene a virtual research workshop in 2026 using online platforms to maintain our transnational scholarly networks. We hope all MESA members will join us in this experiment in virtual gathering, while we continue to work to see these travel bans reversed and our intellectual community restored.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved