A U.S. training camp for Senegal’s women’s basketball team has been cancelled after several players were denied visas, prompting the West African nation’s prime minister to cancel the program.
Senegal was listed alongside Tonga as a country potentially facing U.S. travel restrictions.
It follows a memo, which was signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and recently sent to U.S. diplomats who work with the countries, said the governments of listed nations were being given 60 days to meet new benchmarks and requirements established by the State Department.
It gave them until 8am on Wednesday last week to submit an initial action plan addressing the requirements.
The memo, according to the Washington Post, identified varied benchmarks that, in the administration’s estimation, these countries were failing to meet. Some countries had “no competent or cooperative central government authority to produce reliable identity documents or other civil documents,” or they suffered from “widespread government fraud.” Others had large numbers of citizens who overstayed their visas in the United States, the memo said.
The Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko said this week that his country cancelled a planned training program for the nation’s women’s basketball team in the U.S. after several team members’ visas were denied, according to an Associated Press report.
The Senegalese basketball team had planned to train in the US for 10 days to warm up for the 2025 Women’s AfroBasket tournament in Ivory Coast next month, the BBC reported.
But the visa applications for five players and seven officials were not approved, according to a statement from the federation.
This prompted an angry response from the prime minister.
“Informed of the refusal of issuing visas to several members of the Senegal women’s national basketball team, I have instructed the Ministry of Sports to simply cancel the ten-day preparatory training initially planned in the United States of America,” Sonko said on Thursday in a statement shared to social media, according to the BBC.
It is unclear whether Senegal’s ban resulted from providing a response unacceptable to the Trump administration or from failing to meet the two deadline periods for compliance.
A State Department official declined to comment on the situation’s specifics, saying “visa records are confidential under U.S. law; therefore, we cannot comment on individual cases.”
Tonga Alarms Over Ban
The recent development by the US follows Tonga Prime Minister Aisake Eke’s statement on Friday that the government is “seriously alarmed” after receiving the ban notification from the US.
Eke stated that the Foreign Ministry is coordinating with the U.S. Consulate in Nuku’alofa to draft a response. The public will be updated once it is ready.
While U.S. media cited deadlines, Eke noted that no official deadline was given for Tonga’s reply.
In reporting the Tonga and the 35 other countries on the ban list Associated Press quoted State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, who declined to comment on the specifics in the cable, which was first reported by The Washington Post.
She confirmed that the administration wanted nations to improve their own vetting processes for passport holders, accept their nationals deported from the U.S. and take other steps to ensure their citizens are not a threat to the U.S.
“We’re looking at providing a period of time, (where if countries) don’t get to that point where we can trust them and they’ve got to change the system, update it, do whatever they need to do to convince us that we can trust the process and the information they have,” she said.
The 36 countries identified in the new cable are: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Ethiopia, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
