This article was last updated and fact checked on August 2, 2024 by Mani Karthik.
Hold a Yemeni passport and looking to travel to USA? Here’s the scoop.
The Yemeni has been ranked 99 by the Henley Passport Index. It allows a Yemeni citizen to travel to 35 countries, visa free, as of January 2018.
However, as of September 2017, entry for Yemeni citizens into the US has been temporarily suspended, both for immigrants and non-immigrants, under the B1, B2 and B-1/B-2 visa categories.
A March 2018 article on Reuters stated that of the 8,400 people who had applied for a US visa from Chad, Libya, Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, between December 8, 2017, and January 8, 2018, only 128 applicants were approved for a visa.
Exemptions to US Entry Ban
For now, there are only a few categories of visa applications that are exempted from the entry ban imposed by the US. According to the presidential proclamation, released by the US Department of National Security & Defense, there are three categories under which a visa might be granted to a Yemeni citizen:
1. The applicant must face “undue hardship” if a visa is denied
2. Travel must be in the interest of the United States
3. The application should not pose any security risk to the US
However, experts believe that this ban is unlikely to be permanent.
In fact, another exemption to the visa ban is that if a Yemeni citizen was in the US with a valid visa at the time the ban was imposed in September 2017, they might be allowed to re-enter America, as stated in Section 7 of the Proclamation.
The ban is already being challenged in the US Supreme Court and a verdict is likely by the end of June 2018.
