South Sudan has criticized the revocation of American visas for all its nationals, saying that 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 SaturdayCiting the refusal of South Sudan to accept the return of its citizens removed from the United States.
But the South Sudan Foreign Ministry said that a man who had been refused after being expelled from the United States was a citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He added that the individual was “returned to the sending country for subsequent treatment”.
This is the first time that the United States has been targeting all passport holders from a private country since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, after campaigning on an anti-immigration platform, with the promise of “mass deportations”.
In his declaration, Rubio said that the United States would also block all citizens from South Sudan, the most recent country in the world, in American entrance ports.
He did not blame “the failure of the South Sudan’s transitional government to accept the return of his citizens repatriated in a timely manner”.
“We will be ready to review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation,” he added.
But in a statement on Monday, the South Sudan Foreign Ministry said that it “deeply regretted” the measurement of coverage against all the citizens of the country on the basis of an isolated incident involving a false declaration by an individual who is not a South Sudanese national “.
He said that the man at the center of the visa row was a Congolese national and that he was sent back to the United States. He added that all supporting evidence was shared with US officials.
But the deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau rejected the explanation of South Sudan as “legally non -relevant”Saying that the Embassy of the African country in Washington “certified this particular individual as one of their nationals”.
“It is unacceptable and irresponsible for representatives of the South Sudanese government to guess the determination of their own embassy,” added Landau.
South Sudan Minister of Sudan, Michael Makuei Lueth, told the news agency to the United States “were trying to find faults with the outstretched situation” in the country because no sovereign nation would accept foreign deportees.
This comes when fears grow up that South Sudan can again fall into the civil war after the first vice-president of the country Riek Machar was placed under house arrest.
The president of South Sudan Salva Kiir accused Machar of having aroused new revolt.
Last month, the United States ordered all its non-urgent staff in South Sudan to leave while fighting broke out in a part of the country, threatening a fragile peace agreement agreed in 2018 which ended a five-year civil war.
In the United States, South Sudanese have already obtained temporary protected status (TPS), which allowed them to stay in the United States for a period of defined time.
TP for South Sudanese in the United States had to expire on May 3.
