US President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order creating a “state sponsor of wrongful detention” designation meant to penalize countries that wrongfully imprison Americans.
The new designation is meant to deter countries from illegally detaining US citizens and encourage them to release wrongful detainees that they have in custody. It will be up to the secretary of state to determine which countries will be given the designation.
“Through this Executive Order, actors designated as State Sponsors of Wrongful Detention may face severe penalties including economic sanctions, visa restrictions, foreign assistance restrictions, and travel restrictions for U.S. passport holders,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Friday.
“The bottom line: Anyone who uses an American as a bargaining chip will pay the price,” he said.
The administration did not announce what countries might be designated as state sponsors of wrongful detention. Nations like Venezuela, Russia, Iran, China and Afghanistan all have a history of wrongfully detaining Americans.
There are currently US citizens designated as wrongfully detained or held hostage in Russia and Afghanistan, and Americans remain imprisoned in China and Iran.
A senior administration official noted there could be “travel restrictions for US passport holders.” Currently, the US does not allow Americans to travel to North Korea on US passports without an approved exception, and in those cases, the State Department issues a “special validation passport.”
The official said that countries would be given notice that they are at risk of the designation, “and they will have a certain pool of time to fix it.”
The new designation applies to both foreign governments as well as “entities controlling significant territory, even if they are not currently recognized governments,” another senior administration official said. This would allow it to be used in places like Afghanistan, where at least one American – Mahmood Habibi – remains detained. The US does not recognize the Taliban as an official government.
This senior administration official said the executive order allows the administration access to the “toolbox” of punitive measures that are used against countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism.
“It’s a widening of the aperture against whom we can use those tools. You don’t have to be funding Hamas, Hezbollah or al-Qaeda, you can simply be trying to exploit our citizens wrongfully,” the official said.
The move was welcomed by advocates working against wrongful detentions and hostage taking.
The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation in a statement called the new executive order “a critical step forward in confronting a deeply entrenched practice that violates international norms and endangers innocent lives.”
“We urge all governments wrongfully detaining American citizens to take this moment—before the first designations under this executive order are issued—to immediately and unconditionally release all American captives,” said the organization, named in honor of Foley, who was murdered in ISIS captivity.
The family of Robert Levinson expressed gratitude to the administration for the new executive order. Levinson, a former FBI agent, was abducted in Iran in 2007 and was never publicly seen or heard from again. His family said in 2020 they believed he had died in Iranian custody. Tehran has denied they detained him.
“Every government guilty of this barbaric conduct must understand that they will be held accountable and will pay a price backed by the full force of the United States government,” they said in a statement.
Global Reach, a nonprofit that works to bring home Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad, said the new designation “is something that will put real teeth behind the US government’s efforts to bring home detained Americans and deter offending nations from engaging in ‘hostage diplomacy.’”
Paul Whelan, a former wrongful detainee held in Russia for nearly six years, said that the new designation is a “good start,” but also encouraged the US government to “ensure that once home, hostages are taken care of properly.”
Former President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2022 meant to deter hostage taking and wrongful detention of Americans, declaring it a national emergency. The Biden administration also implemented the “D” indicator on State Department travel advisories for individual countries to highlight that a US citizen is at risk of being taken hostage or wrongfully detained if they travel there.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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