House Democrats are pushing the Trump administration to allow Palestinian children injured in the Israel-Hamas war to seek emergency medical care in the United States. The State Department halted the issuance of visas for people from Gaza, including medical-humanitarian visas, citing a need to examine the process that allowed some of those visitors to enter the U.S. The official pause came a day after right-wing activist Laura Loomer attacked the humanitarian visas as a threat to national security. In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, over 140 House Democrats said the policy change was ill-conceived and called on the administration to reverse course and end the visa pause for the sake of providing injured children with “the medical care they desperately need.”
The letter was endorsed by more than two-thirds of the House Democratic Caucus, including prominent defenders of Israel such as Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Kim Schrier (D-Wash.). A number of Palestinians had already entered the country on medical-humanitarian visas when Loomer, who has successfully lobbied for administrative changes over the course of the year, went on social media to condemn the new arrivals. The State Department posted its own message on X saying the visas would be temporarily paused while they conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days.
House Democrats are not convinced and have asked Rubio to specify the national security concerns that led his agency to halt the visas and provide a timeline governing its internal review. Meanwhile, the lawmakers are urging the administration to exempt those Palestinians most in need of emergency medical attention from the pause.
