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The United States says it will suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 countries around the world, as US President Donald Trump’s administration continues its wide-reaching crackdown on immigration.

The Department of State said on Wednesday that visa processing would be paused for countries “whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates”.

“The freeze will remain active until the US can ensure that new immigrants will not extract wealth from the American people,” it said, adding that the measure would affect “dozens of countries”, including Somalia, Haiti, Iran and Eritrea.

Trump has pursued a hardline, anti-immigration agenda since he returned to office in January 2025, promising to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history.

Over the past year, he has announced curbs to several US visa programmes and drastically slashed the number of planned refugee admissions into the US.

His administration has also deployed heavily armed immigration officers to major US cities to detain and deport people accused of being in the country illegally.

The State Department said earlier this week that it has revoked more than 100,000 visas since Trump’s return to the White House, a one-year record.

The Department of Homeland Security last month said the Trump administration has deported more than 605,000 people, while 2.5 million others left the US on their own.

The State Department did not immediately release a full list of the countries that will be subjected to the freeze on immigrant visas on Wednesday.

The AFP news agency, citing an unnamed US official, said Brazil, Egypt, Thailand, Nigeria, Iraq and Yemen would be among those affected.

Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman said the freeze on immigrant visa processing would begin on January 21.

The move will not apply to applicants seeking non-immigrant, or temporary tourist or business, visas.

David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, said the Trump administration “has proven itself to have the most anti-legal immigration agenda in American history”.

“This action will ban nearly half of all legal immigrants to the United States, turning away about 315,000 legal immigrants over the next year alone,” Bier said in a statement.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said Wednesday’s announcement, when combined with previously announced US travel bans, means the Trump administration “has now banned or suspended immigrant visas for 90 different countries”.

Three detained British activists who spent weeks refusing food have ended their hunger strike, citing a report that a United Kingdom-based subsidiary of a major Israeli weapons company was denied a UK government contract.

The Prisoners for Palestine group said in a statement on Wednesday that hunger strikers Kamran Ahmed, Heba Muraisi and Lewie Chiaramello ended their strike after one of their “key” demands was achieved.

“Our prisoners’ hunger strike will be remembered as a landmark moment of pure defiance; an embarrassment for the British state,” the group said.

Several people affiliated with the proscribed group Palestine Action had refused food in UK prisons since November in protest of their detention and the British government’s support for Israel as it wages a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.

The activists’ relatives and friends had warned that their prolonged hunger strike put them at risk of serious health problems and even death.

The Times reported on Tuesday that Elbit Systems UK, a subsidiary of the Israeli arms manufacturer of the same name, had failed to win a $2.69bn contract to help train British soldiers.

Citing an unnamed UK Ministry of Defence “insider”, the news outlet said the department instead chose to award the contract to a rival consortium led by Raytheon UK.

“The abrupt cancellation of this deal is a resounding victory for the hunger strikers, who resisted with their incarcerated bodies to shed light on the role of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, in the colonisation and occupation of Palestine,” Prisoners for Palestine said.

For years, Palestinian rights activists have called on countries to divest from Elbit Systems over its role in supplying the Israeli military with weapons used in alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory.

That includes the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, where Israel’s military assault has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians since October 2023.

The Palestine Action hunger-strikers were jailed over their alleged involvement in break-ins at the UK subsidiary of Elbit Systems in Filton near Bristol in 2024.

The British government proscribed Palestine Action in June of last year under the country’s Terrorism Act 2000, making it illegal for people to join or express support for the group under penalty of up to 14 years in prison.

Since then, scores of people have been detained at protests across the UK for expressing support for the group in what critics say is a draconian crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly.

On Wednesday, Prisoners for Palestine said a total of seven activists had started to eat again after ending their hunger strikes.

British MP John McDonnell hailed the hunger strikers’ “dedication” in a social media post.

British prosecutors have sought to reinstate a “terrorism” charge against a member of Irish rap group Kneecap for allegedly displaying a flag of Lebanese group Hezbollah during a gig in London, after a judge threw out the case last year.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) launched a High Court challenge on Wednesday, arguing that a chief magistrate erred in September when he dismissed the case against Liam O’Hanna, also known as Liam Og O hAnnaidh in Irish, over a technical error.

O’Hanna, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged with displaying the flag at a November 21, 2024, concert in London, breaching the United Kingdom’s 2000 Terrorism Act.

In written submissions unveiled in court, the CPS “submits that the Learned judge was wrong to find that the proceedings … were not instituted in the correct form”.

Kneecap – known for their politically charged lyrics and support for Palestinian rights – have said the case is an attempt to distract from what they described as British complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The band has called the attempted prosecution of O’Hanna a “British state witch-hunt”.

“Today more Palestinians were murdered by Israel,” Kneecap wrote in a social media post on Wednesday after the court hearing.

“More homes demolished and more children dead due to cold and lack of aid not permitted to enter by Israel. That is the ONLY thing about this whole witch-hunt worth talking about,” the band said, denouncing the legal proceedings as “a waste of public time and public money”.

O’Hanna was charged in May after a video emerged from the London concert in which he allegedly displayed the Hezbollah flag, an offence he has denied.

Kneecap previously said the flag was thrown on stage during their performance and that they “do not, and have never” supported Hezbollah.

The charge against O’Hanna was thrown out in September after a court ruled it had originally been brought without the permission of the director of public prosecutions and the attorney general, as well as one day outside the six-month statutory limit.

But CPS lawyer Paul Jarvis told London’s High Court on Wednesday that permission was only required by the time O’Hanna first appeared in court, meaning the case can proceed.

O’Hanna did not attend the hearing.

But his bandmate, JJ O Dochartaigh, better known by the stage name DJ Provai, was in court alongside the band’s manager, Dan Lambert, and its lawyers.

About 100 Kneecap supporters also turned up at the court to show their support, holding Irish and Palestinian flags, singing songs and listening to speeches.