South Sudan has criticised the revoking of US visas for all its nationals, saying it was based on an incident involving a citizen of a different African country.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the visa ban on Saturday, citing South Sudan’s refusal to accept the return of its citizens being removed from the US.
But South Sudan’s foreign ministry said that a man who was refused entry after being deported from the US was a citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It added that the individual was “returned to the sending country for further processing”.
This is the first time the US is targeting all passport holders from a particular country since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, having campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, with the promise of “mass deportations”.
In his statement, Rubio said that the US would also block any arriving citizens of South Sudan, the world’s newest country, at US ports of entry.
He blamed “the failure of South Sudan’s transitional government to accept the return of its repatriated citizens in a timely manner”.
“We will be prepared to review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation,” he added.
But in a statement on Monday, South Sudan’s foreign ministry said it “deeply regrets” the blanket measure against all of the country’s citizens based on “an isolated incident involving misrepresentation by an individual who is not a South Sudanese national”.
It said the man at the centre of the visa row was a Congolese national and he was returned to the US. It added that all supporting evidence was shared with American officials.
South Sudan’s Information Minister Michael Makuei Lueth told the AP news agency that the US was “attempting to find faults with the tense situation” in the country because no sovereign nation would accept foreign deportees.
It comes as fears grow that South Sudan may again descend into civil war after the country’s First Vice-President Riek Machar had been placed under house arrest.
South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir accused Machar of stirring up a new revolt.
Last month, the US ordered all its non-emergency staff in South Sudan to leave as fighting broke out in one part of the country, threatening a fragile peace deal agreed in 2018 that ended a five-year civil war.
South Sudanese in the US were previously granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which allowed them to remain in the US for a set period of time.
TPS for South Sudanese in the US had been due to expire by 3 May.
