Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point.

​

 Summary

“Trump’s executive order and legal efforts on mail-in ballots have caused voter confusion and administrative strain. Judge Talwani blocked the rules, while officials in states like Florida and Arizona urge alternatives. Uncertainty persists before the midterms.

​

From Oregon to Florida, officials are at once reassuring voters that their ballots are safe and encouraging them to use drop boxes or vote in person.

Sept. 6, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET

Mail-in votes being processed by officials at the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Office in Largo, Fla., last month.Zack Wittman for The New York Times

By Anna GriffinRebecca Fairley RaneyKendal Asbury and David Iversen

President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections.

The contortions have county registrars dusting off Election Day contingency plans developed for natural disasters like floods and wildfires. They have struggled to make it through planning meetings before the latest version of the rules change, and many are encouraging voters to avoid the U.S. Postal Service all together.

Among voters, confusion abounds.

“I don’t trust mail-in or in-person, to be honest with you,” said Lori Woo, a 53-year-old teacher from Wildomar, Calif. She has voted both in person and by mail and now wonders whether any of her votes were counted.

Arizona officials have been encouraging voters like Antonio Bergier, an 83-year-old retired geologist, to drop off ballots in person. But he said he didn’t know whether his hometown, Patagonia, or his county, Santa Cruz, had ballot drop boxes — nor would he use them anyway.

Mail, he said, is “the only way they’re getting my vote this year.”

Twenty states are set to mail ballots to voters by Sept. 19, starting with North Carolina, which began sending out absentee ballots on Friday.

“We plan to proceed as planned,” Sam Hayes, the director of North Carolina’s elections board, said at a news conference on Thursday.

But even election officials were reluctant to issue reassuring encomiums.

“I wish that I could tell my constituents to not worry, and I can’t,” said Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, who oversees elections in Pima County, Ariz., where 85 percent of ballots are delivered early or by mail.

In many places with mail-in voting, the bulk of ballots aren’t scheduled to go out for another month. But the response has already begun.

In Los Angeles County, one of the largest voting districts in the nation, elections officers have responded to the uncertainty with ballot distribution and collection plans that were deployed after the devastating Eaton and Palisades wildfires of 2025. Ideas include expanding in-person options like pop-up voting sites, places where people could request and fill out ballots.

“If this is a problem, let’s make it an administrative problem, not a voter problem,” said Dean Logan, the L.A. County registrar. “We do not want voters to be deterred from voting.”

In Arizona, Ms. Cázares-Kelly described a flood of calls from worried voters. During a briefing this week with Arizona’s secretary of state, attorney general and 15 county recorders about the proposed Postal Service mail-ballot rule, news broke of an emergency filing from the Trump administration trying to reinstate parts of the rule a court had blocked.

And in Leon County, Fla., the elections supervisor, Mark Earley, and his team had envelopes with trackable bar codes on every mail ballot, as the Postal Service wanted. But this week, when the county submitted its envelope for inspection, federal officials rejected it. Mr. Earley worries there isn’t enough time to revamp the envelopes, get the Postal Service’s approval and send ballots.

“If the rule goes into effect, we will have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters in Florida,” he said. “And nationwide, millions, without a doubt.”

Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, predicted there would be “chaos” that Florida hasn’t seen since the hanging chads, butterfly ballots and history-making presidential recount of 2000. He plans to drop his own ballot off at his local polling place rather than rely on the mail.

Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in the last presidential race, and states have broad authority over how elections are conducted. But since his re-election, Mr. Trump, who voted by mail himself twice this year, has pushed to eliminate or severely restrict the option.

He set the current upheaval in motion in March, when he signed an executive order directing the Postal Service to impose new requirements on mailed ballots, including unique bar codes on ballot envelopes and lists from each state identifying voters eligible to receive ballots by mail. The Postal Service has said it could refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply.

A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the requirements nationally on Aug. 28 while she considered whether to issue a longer injunction. That decision came four days after a divided Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans.

On Thursday in an emergency appeal, the Trump administration again asked the Supreme Court to let it move ahead, hours after the judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, expressed concern that the plans could cause so much chaos in the coming elections that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.”

On Friday evening, Judge Talwani intervened for a third time, ruling that the administration’s plans are likely illegal and should not be implemented ahead of the midterms.

Meantime, a Postal Service whistle-blower said last week that the agency was rushing to build the computer system needed to enforce the new requirements in violation of court orders.

A White House spokeswoman, Lauren Bis, said any confusion around the fall elections “was caused by radical Democrats’ litigation” over “common-sense measures” to ensure election security. She accused Democrats of refusing to guarantee that “Americans, and only Americans, decide our elections.”

U.S. intelligence agencies and independent election security experts have found no credible evidence that any foreign government has successfully manipulated, altered or intercepted mail-in ballots.

Still, voters across the country are preparing for November without knowing what the rules will be. In Clark County, Wash., part of a swing House district along the state’s southern border, the elections office receives a dozen or so calls and emails a day from anxious constituents.

“The biggest thing they want to know is if things are going to change,” said Rich Cooper, the county elections manager. “We have to tell them we just don’t know yet.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread fraud is inherent in voting by mail. He declared in March that “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.”

Democrats and some election regulators say even if the Postal Service doesn’t succeed with its rules this year, the uncertainty and frustration already created are the point.

“This White House is making it so hard for people to participate in the democratic process,” said Hector Sánchez Barba, who runs Mi Familia Vota, an Arizona nonprofit that helps Latino and immigrant communities engage in politics.

The befuddlement crosses party lines. Yvette Avera, a 62-year-old Republican in Temecula, Calif., usually votes by mail but has already told her family they should vote in person this year. “If I do it in person, I’ve got myself covered,” she said.

Some people have only one option. Michelle Coppadge, 54, of Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., said she would rather vote at a polling place “where they’re verifying who you are.” But her 94-year-old mother-in-law will not be able to vote if mail-in balloting goes away because “she just doesn’t leave her home.”

The first extensive experiments with mailed ballots were in the 1980s, led by Republican leaders in rural Oregon who wanted to increase participation where voting at a centralized polling place meant long drives, often in rotten weather. Today, some Republicans blame Democratic dominance in West Coast states on the ease of mail-in balloting.

Some of the biggest fights and steepest confusion over remote voting this year are in states that could decide which party controls Congress, such as Michigan, with its heated Senate race, and Pennsylvania with its three tossup House seats.

Adia Harbert, 19, attends the University of Central Florida but is registered to vote back home in Coopersburg, Pa., where Democrats hope to unseat the freshman Representative Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican.

She said she’s eager to vote this fall but can’t fly home for the election and is worried she won’t be able to figure out the vote-by-mail system in time.

“Voting by mail is basically my only option,” she said.

The uncertainty reminds Eric Traibin, a lawyer in Orlando, Fla., of 2000, when Florida left the outcome of the presidential race unresolved for more than a month.

He said he believes mail-in balloting is safe, but still plans to vote at the polls.

“I’m just a very neurotic person,” he said.

Election officials say they’re doing the best they can to ensure the legal fights over mail voting don’t scare off or disenfranchise would-be voters, but compliance with whatever rules the Trump administration settles on has been a struggle.

So some election officials are urging voters to go back to the old ways, mixing their messages of reassurances with pleas to change voting behavior. Oregon’s secretary of state, for example, is asking state legislators for money to add ballot drop boxes and plans to encourage people to use them rather than rely on the mail.

In Alaska, many rural villages count on the Postal Service to deliver full polling places, not just ballots. This year, it’s home to one of the most hotly contested Senate races in the country.

“Even if you want to vote in person, they have to mail the literal ballot box, the voting stands with the flags on them, the pins, the stickers, the ballots, everything,” said Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, a nonprofit. “This is in places where you can go three weeks without mail if the weather turns or your village clerk gets sick.”

Four years ago, the Postal Service failed to deliver ballots from six western Alaska villages in time to be counted. This year, Ms. Sparck’s organization is urging voters to request ballots early, return them as soon as possible and, when in doubt, ask their local postal clerks to hand-cancel envelopes.

“We are already struggling with some skepticism and apathy,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like any lessons have been learned.”

Reporting was contributed by Eduardo Medina, Eric Adelson and Valerie Crowder.

Anna Griffin is the Pacific Northwest bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Oregon.“

  

Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists

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 Summary

“Dan Bongino and federal officials launched an expansive investigation targeting at least eight scientists, including Anthony Fauci and David Morens, over alleged lab-leak cover-ups. Morens pleaded guilty to concealing records and receiving gratuities; Fauci received a pardon.

​

As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive effort against a wider circle of researchers.

Sept. 5, 2026

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were shown models of the coronavirus during a tour of the National Institutes of Health in March 2020.Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were shown models of the coronavirus during a tour of the National Institutes of Health in March 2020.Doug Mills/The New York Times

In early 2025, Dan Bongino, the fiery No. 2 official at the F.B.I., summoned dozens of agents to the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Mr. Bongino, a conservative media personality recently elevated to the deputy’s role, demanded to know why a yearslong inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic had stalled — and why investigators had not more forcefully scrutinized the role of government scientists, current and former officials said.

At one point, he squared off against an official who questioned the theory that he and many supporters of President Trump had long promoted: that the virus had not merely leaked from a Chinese lab, but that American researchers, among them Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, had orchestrated a conspiracy to cover up that fact.

The meeting became so heated that Mr. Bongino ultimately asked the official to leave the room, an attendee said.

Mr. Bongino, who stepped down from the F.B.I. in January to return to podcasting, and other officials helped set in motion a sprawling and aggressive investigative effort that has outlasted his tenure, The New York Times has learned.

As part of that effort, F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors have sought evidence related to at least eight scientists, among them a Nobel laureate and influential former government researchers like Dr. Fauci.

Investigators have demanded phone, email, grant and payment records, as well as grand jury testimony by scientists.

This account of the investigations is drawn from interviews with six current and former officials familiar with them, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, as well as documents reviewed by The Times.

It is not clear what evidence those inquiries have produced or what their status is. Dr. Fauci, once the government’s chief infectious disease scientist, received a pre-emptive pardon last year from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that protects him from federal prosecution for official actions from 2014 to 2025.

The inquiries were underway well before Republican lawmakers last month asked the Department of Justice to investigate Dr. Fauci’s refusal to answer questions before a Senate panel. They have continued playing out behind the scenes as those lawmakers released documents that have bruised Dr. Fauci’s reputation.

Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the F.B.I., at a news conference in Washington, flanked by former Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

Many scientists see the federal government’s investigative effort as an attempt to punish political enemies and deflect blame from the first Trump administration for the catastrophic effects of the pandemic.

While the origins of the coronavirus have not definitively been established, these researchers point to the fact that the inquiries have failed to produce any clear evidence that Dr. Fauci or other American scientists covered up knowledge of a lab leak, or funded or collaborated on research that led to one.

Mr. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, accuse those scientists of helping to start the pandemic and aggravating its harms, and believe the inquiries represent overdue accountability.

The F.B.I.’s efforts during the Biden administration focused mainly on whether Covid emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, though federal investigators also began examining some individual scientists.

Under Mr. Trump, the investigation has expanded as federal agents and prosecutors sought evidence against new targets and intensified their scrutiny of scientists.

Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Dr. Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal federal records by steering government emails into a personal account. In those emails, Dr. Morens discussed efforts to defend researchers who were under suspicion for collaborating with the Wuhan lab.

Dr. Morens wrote that he was trying to protect researchers from what he described as baseless “political charges” of a lab leak.

A subpoena for documents in that case, dated September 2025 and reviewed by The Times, showed that federal prosecutors in Maryland sought evidence about Dr. Fauci, too, including any emails he sent to certain researchers from his personal account or payments he received for intervening on behalf of federal grantees.

Prosecutors in Maryland also recently demanded the testimony before a federal grand jury of a former staff member at EcoHealth Alliance, a defunct nonprofit that the Trump White House has said used N.I.H. funding to facilitate “dangerous” research at the Wuhan lab where the administration believes the pandemic started.

EcoHealth executives have denied those claims. The N.I.H. has said that viruses being studied there with American funding bore no resemblance to the one that set off the pandemic.

In a separate line of inquiry, agents in the F.B.I.’s Cleveland office have recently examined whether Dr. Fauci and other government scientists pressured virologists in early 2020 to downplay the possibility that the pandemic originated in a lab. Mr. Bongino last year singled out one of those agents as a key player in an expanded investigation.

The F.B.I. and Department of Justice declined to comment for this article. Mr. Bongino conceded on his podcast last month that “there are a lot of complications with any case that may develop against Anthony Fauci because of the pardon,” even as he credited “the cleanup operation we instituted when we went over there” for Dr. Morens’s indictment.

On his podcast in 2024, Mr. Bongino said that government scientists had dismissed the lab leak theory because they wanted to undermine Mr. Trump.

“They knew that would be a destructive narrative for them because Donald Trump had been talking about the danger of China the entire time,” Mr. Bongino said. “So they hid the lab leak.”

A Theory About a Cover-Up

Shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, his administration pulled down a website meant to help Americans find Covid vaccines and treatments and, in its place, posted a full-length image of Mr. Trump atop a new page that described why true blame for the pandemic rested with scientists.

“LAB LEAK,” the page declared — a leak that it suggested Dr. Fauci, Dr. Morens and EcoHealth scientists had helped to conceal.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran for nearly 40 years, financed collaborations between EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that studied coronaviruses in the city where the Covid outbreak began.

Some researchers favor the idea of a lab leak, whether or not American funding was involved, citing assertions by intelligence officials that the lab probably failed to use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time.

Most scientists favor a so-called natural origin theory, pointing to new datapublished in recent years supporting the idea that the virus spilled from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, a tried-and-true route for emerging deadly viruses, including past outbreaks in China.

American intelligence officials have said there was no indication that the Wuhan lab had been in possession of the pandemic coronavirus “or a close progenitor” before the Covid outbreak.

In Congress, Republican lawmakers began gathering evidence against scientists as the 2024 election approached.

“You make a pyramid,” said Mitchell Benzine, the staff director of the Republican-run Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic from 2023 to 2025, describing the panel’s strategy. “You talk to and get documents from the bottom of the pyramid, and you work your way up.”

If Dr. Fauci was at the top of the pyramid, Dr. Morens, his former adviser, was nearer its base. The subcommittee discovered a trove of brash emails from 2020 and 2021 in which Dr. Morens described plans to evade federal records laws, including by learning how to “make emails disappear.”

Dr. Morens wrote about trying to quietly involve Dr. Fauci in efforts to defend against what he described as threats to “scientific independence” and to EcoHealth, whose N.I.H. grant was canceled under orders from the first Trump administration in 2020. 

Dr. Morens said in the emails that he wanted to protect scientists from attacks he suggested were analogous to the “Salem Witch Trials.”

It is not clear precisely when federal prosecutors in Maryland began investigating those emails, but documents reviewed by The Times indicate it was toward the end of Mr. Biden’s presidency.

By last fall, federal prosecutors were also examining Dr. Fauci and a half dozen other scientists, including Richard J. Roberts, a Nobel laureate in medicine, who had organized a letter denouncing the cancellation of EcoHealth’s grant, according to a September 2025 subpoena to EcoHealth.

The subpoena asked for evidence that Dr. Fauci had drafted or edited documents for EcoHealth, including records related to the Wuhan lab; correspondence from Dr. Fauci’s personal email address to EcoHealth; and evidence that the group had compensated Dr. Fauci with “currency, gift baskets, wine, meals, travel” or other items.

In addition to violations of federal records laws, Dr. Morens pleaded guilty last month to receiving illegal gratuities in the form of two bottles of The Prisoner Red Blend Napa Valley wine from Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s former president.

Dr. Daszak said the wine had been a joking allusion to calls in 2020 for his and other scientists’ imprisonment. (Dr. Daszak and EcoHealth were later barredfrom federal contracts under Mr. Biden over allegations that they failed to properly monitor work at the Wuhan lab, which Dr. Daszak and the nonprofit denied.)

Government oversight experts criticized Dr. Morens’s efforts to hide critical correspondence about the pandemic, while noting that Trump administration officials have themselves been said to conduct government business on private email accounts or an encrypted messaging app.

“It seems like retaliation,” Dr. Daszak said of the case, in which he appears as an unnamed co-conspirator. “The right learned pretty early on in Covid that public health is a threat to power.”

Timothy Belevetz, Dr. Morens’s lawyer, said that Dr. Morens “has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”

Dr. Fauci has said he “knew nothing” about Dr. Morens’s actions. His lawyers have created a defense fund to respond to what they described as a “legal barrage” that followed his refusal to answer questions from a Senate panel in July, including the announcement of state investigations. The panel voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.

“Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong, and there is no basis for any investigations, whether by Congress, the Department of Justice, or state attorneys general,” David Schertler, his lawyer, said. 

“The only thing that will come from these completely unjustified efforts to besmirch Dr. Fauci’s reputation and his lifelong commitment to public health is wasted time and resources that would be better used on real issues.”

The F.B.I., which has for years asserted that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, has also more recently examined whether Dr. Fauci pushed a group of scientists in early 2020 to downplay early suspicions that the coronavirus may not have evolved naturally.

Republicans have long suggested that Dr. Fauci pressured those scientists into changing their view as they prepared an article about the pandemic’s origin, perhaps by plying one of them with a federal grant.

Dr. Fauci and the scientists deny those claims. The grant in question was reviewed and approved for funding before Dr. Fauci discussed the origin with those scientists, he said.

The researchers said their initial suspicions were allayed instead by more extensive analyses of coronaviruses in other species, like bats and pangolins, which showed that unusual-seeming features of the novel virus were in fact present in naturally occurring viruses.

Democratic lawmakers said that the attacks on Dr. Fauci and other scientists echoed past efforts to prosecute political enemies.

“It smacks of McCarthyism because it seeks to demonize individuals for seemingly fictional and illusory reasons,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “The question is whether there’s selective targeting.”

Mr. Bongino has blamed Dr. Fauci and other government scientists not only for financing research that led to the pandemic, but also for using the resulting catastrophe to push social distancing measures and mail-in balloting provisions in 2020.

He has said on his podcast that those measures were introduced for one purpose, referring to an outcome that multiple investigations have established did not happen: “Steal the election. One hundred percent.”

Kirsten Noyes and Georgia Gee contributed research. Adam Goldmancontributed reporting.

Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York.

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.“

 

I Went to School in America. I Started My Business in America. I Can’t Stay in America.

​

 Summary

“A presidential proclamation added Tanzania to entry restrictions, ending business, student, and exchange visas; Benjamin Fernandes, NALA’s founder, lost his visa and was denied a national interest exception. The ban blocks founders and students despite contributions.

​

Sept. 2, 2026

Benny Douet

By Benjamin Fernandes

Mr. Fernandes is the founder and chief executive of NALA, a cross-border payments company.

I was 17 when the University of Northwestern-St. Paul offered me a scholarship in 2010. When I was 21, Stanford’s M.B.A. program did the same. From there, I went on to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where I learned how financial technology could change millions of lives.

In the years after I finished my degrees, I started a financial-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., backed by American investors, that now serves more than 500,000 customers in the United States. But these days I’m running my American company from abroad: The same country that invested in me won’t let me, or thousands of others like me, return to the United States. With rare exceptions, Tanzanian nationals like myself are barred from entry.

The company I founded, NALA, helps immigrants and businesses in the United States, Britain and Europe send money across borders to build businesses and keep their families afloat. I have met customers who use our service to pay a parent’s hospital bill or a cousin’s school fees, or to keep a small business open across continents. Over the past four years, we have raised more than $60 million from American venture firms, including Y Combinator, Accel and Bessemer. Forbes twice ranked us among the world’s top 50 fintech companies. Our investors and board members are American. I set out on a mission to use software to make this better and cheaper for people in emerging markets.

NALA pays U.S. taxes. Nearly every consequential decision about the company’s future, every board meeting, every fund-raising event, every bet on where we go next, is made on American soil.

That is why what is happening now is so hard to reconcile.

On Jan. 1, a presidential proclamation went into effect, adding Tanzania to a group of 24 countries facing new entry restrictions. The United States stopped issuing the business-visitor visa I relied on, as well as student and exchange visas and other visa types, to these countries. The visa allowed founders like me to fly in to the United States for meetings with investors, customers and partners, and to sit in the boardroom. After the proclamation, anyone with a valid visa could use it until it expired, but it cannot be renewed, and no new one will be issued. Mine ran out on July 10.

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The education I received in America turned a Tanzanian teenager into the founder of a company that answers to American investors. Then the government closed its doors to me. I have never broken any laws in the United States, or elsewhere. I did not enter the country illegally. I pose no security risk. I have been shut out of the country simply because of the passport I carry. The U.S. government’s stated rationale is a statistic: Tanzanians overstay business and tourist visas at relatively higher rates than people from some other countries.

But a statistic is not a person. A blanket ban punishes those who follow the rules just as harshly as it does those who do not. I have crossed the U.S. border for 17 years in a row now. I have always left exactly when I said I would.

I now run my company from abroad, between London and Dar es Salaam, over video. But fund-raising and enterprise sales are relationship businesses. The trust that closes a round, or a bank partnership, is built in the room, over dinner, in the hallway after the meeting. You do not Zoom your way to a deal.

Close readers of the presidential proclamation may point out that the decision lets officials grant an individual entry if it’s in the national interest. I am aware of this loophole: I applied for it, and was rejected. If that clause means anything, surely it should cover those who are building American companies and paying Americans salaries. In my case, it did not.

I am far from the only person affected by the shuttering of U.S. ports of entry to foreign nationals from all 39 countries with travel bans. And even though I am personally devastated by the expiration of my business visa, the barriers that matter to me most are the new roadblocks to student visas. I arrived on one. So did 234 of the founders or co-founders behind America’s current privately held billion-dollar companies, each creating on average over a thousand American jobs. Nearly three in five of those billion-dollar start-up companies have an immigrant founder; almost half of the Fortune 500 in 2025 was built by immigrants or their children, producing over 15 million jobs worldwide. I have Tanzanian friends who got admitted into top schools like Harvard this year on scholarship, but they can’t attend because of the visa rule.

I can list off the top of my head companies and individuals whose lives and contributions to society were predicated on sane border policies. Two Nigerians come to mind. Tope Awotona came to Atlanta as a teenager and later built the scheduling company Calendly into a $3 billion business. Adebayo Ogunlesi built the world’s largest independent infrastructure investor and sold it to BlackRock for $12.5 billion; he now sits on the board of OpenAI. Nigeria is now also on the presidential ban list.

Somewhere, another 17-year-old is being offered a place on an American campus. She might build the next great American company. She might create thousands of jobs. Or, denied a visa, she might never be able to board the plane even with a full scholarship to Stanford or Harvard in hand.

America has always been exceptional because it believed in people before anyone else did. It believed in me. Would it still?

Benjamin Fernandes is the founder and chief executive of NALA, a cross-border payments company.“