Citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen will face new restrictions in travelling to the United States based on the latest proclamation signed by President Donald Trump.
The new rules, announced on Sunday, will go into effect on October 18.
The range of restrictions imposed on each state is different, for example in the case of Venezuela, only certain government officials and their families are affected.
They range from an indefinite ban on visas for citizens from countries such as Syria to more targeted restrictions.
The Republican president’s ban has been challenged in courts and censured by human rights activists on multiple occasions.
"Making America Safe is my number one priority. We will not admit those into our country we cannot safely vet," Trump said in a tweet shortly after the proclamation was released.
On Friday, the president received policy recommendations from acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke and was briefed by other administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a White House aide told Reuters earlier in the day.
His former ban on travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, which was enacted in March, expired on Sunday evening.
It was supposed to target those who lacked a "credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States."
'Same Muslim ban with cosmetic adjustments '
The new proclamation removes Sudan but adds Venezuela and North Korea, which have been engaged in bitter rows with the Trump administration recently.
"North Korea does not cooperate with the United States government in any respect and fails to satisfy all information-sharing requirements," the proclamation said.
Johnathan Smith, the legal director of the advocacy group Muslim Advocates, dismissed the new move as the "same Muslim ban" and an effort "to undermine our Constitution."
"Let us not be fooled by the administration's attempted tricks and semantics, this is still the same Muslim ban," he told the Associated Press. "The administration is once again making cosmetic adjustments to the Muslim ban in hopes that it will pass the barest possible definition of anything else; but they've failed again."
People from the six Muslim majority countries were banned from entering into the US for 90 days in the expiring ban.
Revised a few times, the ban originally followed 2016 campaign pledge by Trump for a “complete” shutdown of Muslims entering the US on the pretext of the so-called war on terror.
