Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

6. Department of State · Notable

Strictly enforce visa reciprocity for all foreign nationals

Partially done

177 6. Department of State

“The United States should strictly enforce the doctrine of reciprocity when issuing visas to all foreign nationals.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Department tightened its reciprocity rule but there is no allowlisted record of a systematic enforcement sweep. 9 FAM 403.8, the chapter that governs nonimmigrant visa reciprocity, was reissued on 2025-03-26 (change transmittal CT:VISA-2143) with new operative text at 403.8-4(B): the Visa Office “generally will not support pursuing validity increases” where the receiving state is not issuing reciprocally, is uncooperative or at-risk-of-noncompliance for removals, or its nationals have a high overstay rate, and all negotiated changes must be cleared with L/CA and CA/VO/F. That is a stricter reciprocity posture written into the Department's own rules. What cannot be verified from an allowlisted source is the outcome — the country-by-country reciprocity schedules live on travel.state.gov, which answers 403 to `curl` and to WebFetch behind Cloudflare, so no dated schedule change could be read.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • travel.state.gov’s “Reciprocity: What’s New?” page (https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-information-resources/fees/reciprocity-whats-new.html) lists dated changes to the reciprocity schedules and would move this item to done or hold it at partial on evidence. It is blocked to every automated means of reading it we tried.
  • Negative search: a Federal Register search for “visa reciprocity” since 2025-01-20 returns three documents (the Yemen TPS termination, the Visa Bond Program rule and the DHS fixed-period-of-admission rule), none of which is a reciprocity enforcement action; a search for “reciprocity” with “visas” returns ten, same picture. The Department’s 2025-2026 press index (2,313 releases, enumerated from state.gov’s sitemaps) has no reciprocity announcement.
  • Related: #480 (reaction time), #481 (243(d)), both on the same consular cluster.
  • Re-tested 2026-09-03: still shut, and the question stays open. The page refused every way we tried to read it, as did the site’s home page, https://travel.state.gov/; an attempt on 2026-09-02 was refused as well. The contrast on the same day is the point: https://www.state.gov/ opens with real content and its sitemaps list 2,339 press releases, and fam.state.gov was already open. So travel.state.gov itself refuses automated reading; it is not a matter of how the request was made. The item’s partial still rests on the 2025-03-26 reissue of 9 FAM 403.8 alone; the country-by-country reciprocity schedules remain unread, so neither of the two outcomes — a run of dated schedule reductions moving it toward done, or their absence fixing it at partial on evidence — is available.
Action
restrict
Object
Doctrine of visa reciprocity
ID
479