Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately resume granting medical and humanitarian visas to residents of the Gaza Strip.
“Donald Trump promised to secure a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in his first week in office,” Booker stated, “and now, Secretary Rubio is compounding this administration’s failure of leadership with a policy that leaves Gazans who qualify for temporary medical and humanitarian visas, including seriously injured children and civilians who have been caught in the crossfire through no fault of their own, without this lifesaving recourse.”
On Aug. 16, the U.S. State Department announced that all visitor visas from Gaza were being halted as it conducts “a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days.”
Rubio, speaking with “Face the Nation” on CBS on Sunday, said some of the groups involved in bringing children and adults into the United States may have ties to the Hamas terror organization, which broke an existing ceasefire when it attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
He added that there has been evidence “presented to us by numerous congressional offices that some of the organizations bragging about and involved in acquiring these visas have strong links to terrorist groups like Hamas. And so we are not going to be in partnership with groups that are friendly with Hamas.”
Because of that, Rubio said, the State Department decided to pause issuing the visas.
“There was just a small number of them issued to children, but they come with adults accompanying them, obviously,” he told CBS. “And we are going to pause this program and reevaluate how those visas are being vetted and what relationship, if any, has there been by these organizations to the process of acquiring those visas.”
