U.S. Policy on Sudan Disproportionately Hurts Civilians

As the war in Sudan enters its third year, experts, activists and other community members say recent U.S. foreign policy is hurting, not helping, civilians.

This month, the Trump administration banned Sudanese nationals, in addition to 11 other nationalities, from entering the United States, a couple of weeks after the administration imposed sanctions on the country, claiming the Sudanese Armed Forces used chemical weapons in their fight with Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 

Both moves, experts say, have drastically reduced resources and mobility for civilians at the center of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis more than they hinder the competing armed forces. As of April, nearly 13 million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.  

Fighting between the country’s two main military factions began on April 15, 2023, and has devastated much of the physical and social infrastructure of the East African nation. 

While often framed as a domestic conflict, the U.N. and other international bodies have denounced extensive involvement of several external actors in the gold- and resource-rich country. Chief among the foreign actors is the United Arab Emirates, which bought $1.4 billion worth of military aircraft and equipment from the U.S. State Department in May, to the outcry of several U.S. lawmakers who accused the UAE of supporting the RSF. 

In addition to lacking “a competent or cooperative central authority for issuing passports or civil documents,” Sudan made the list for President Donald Trump’s travel ban for yielding a high percentage of people who overstay visas in the United States, according to a press release from the White House.

That accusation landed many more African countries onto the ban than the “Muslim ban” in Trump’s first term, said Diana Konaté, the deputy executive director of policy and advocacy at African Communities Together, a national grassroots organization working to improve the lives of African immigrants in the U.S. “But, if you look at the actual numbers, a lot of African countries have very low numbers of people overstaying.”

She said the use of overstay rate percentages do not present an accurate picture, because countries such as Sudan receive so few visas in comparison to others. In 2023, for example, 191 Sudanese citizens overstayed their F, M and J visas, compared with 445 citizens from France and 855 from South Korea, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

“In our view, if this administration is really looking to address overstays, then targeting the countries that it has targeted is really not the way to go,” Konaté said.

“We’re trapped here, and for what?” 

The ban has left many Sudanese people in limbo, unable to reunite with family members. One of them is S, a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, who has asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns.

S’s family was in Sudan when the war broke out and has since been displaced to Malaysia. Since the ban, they have not been able to see family for fear of leaving and not being able to return to the U.S.

With the targeting of international students, S said they and colleagues are under immense stress. “I have a check-in group with my friends here, and every time I leave the apartment, we have to message each other, ‘I’m going grocery shopping or to the gym’ because you don’t know what is going to happen,” they said.

Because of the deporting of international students, S was forced to take their defense exam six months earlier than scheduled, with two weeks’ notice, because deportees are automatically disenrolled from programs.  

 “We’re trapped here, and for what? We feel unsafe. We have police officers on campus. We have friends left and right being deported,” they said. “I can’t pursue my research normally, because now I’m being watched left and right.”

Aseel Salih, a public health expert and health advocate based in the Washington D.C. area, has also not seen her family since the war broke out. “I’m afraid to lose any more family members, [but] I can’t leave,” she said. “I am the hope for my family and others back home.”

Suad Abdel Aziz, a civil rights attorney and the executive director of anti-imperialist advocacy group Decolonize Sudan, said, “I haven’t seen a lot of people opposing this ban en mass. And I think that is due to some of the ‘Trump effect,’ normalization effect, where it’s so normal at this point — the extreme policies that he is proposing — that people are fatigued.”

Sanctions weaken society, not warring factions

Aziz said that there’s even less attention on the U.S. sanctions against Sudan. 

“We see sanctions as kind of this nebulous thing that may have effects, but we don’t see it as direct warfare,” she said. “We see drones as direct warfare, but actually, there are stats put together about how sanctions have historically killed more people than drones have ever.”

The sanctions, announced May 22, restrict U.S. exports to Sudan as well as access to U.S. government lines of credit. Sudanese officials have rejected U.S. claims that the country used chemical weapons, calling them “baseless.”

The sanctions come as more than half of the population in Sudan is in dire need of humanitarian aid, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Efforts to distribute aid have only been weakened and disrupted, exacerbating the already severe crisis.

“This is a very cruel tactic to deploy at this time, and it’s also a tactic that is meant to destabilize an already destabilized country,” Aziz said.

She called the impact of sanctions on the banking system “an attack on the sovereignty and stability of a Sudanese state.” Financial infrastructure and urban development are being eroded and destroyed, politically and physically, undermining attempts to improve the situation, especially for those on the ground.  

“Civilians will face the brunt of the hyperinflation of all of the basic goods, the fuel, the basic food goods; there will be mass shortages of these goods due to that hyperinflation,” Aziz said. “That is coming at a time of severe mass starvation already.”

S grew up in Sudan, under sanctions their whole life. “It affected every part of life. You would see people dying from very simple things they shouldn’t have died [from, like] lack of medication or lack of needles sometimes,” they said. Domestic production, importing and exporting are all made more difficult under sanctions, which increases brain drain, S said, because people get so frustrated with the difficulty of living under sanctions, they look for ways to leave for other countries.

“The problem with sanctions is they’re supposed to weaken the ruling party, but they don’t,” S said. “They weaken societies. They weaken civilians.”

S, like many Sudanese people, said that although they vow to keep championing the Sudanese cause, it’s demoralizing to feel like no one is listening.

Holding the UAE to account

According to U.N. reports, the RSF has been identified as chiefly responsible for ongoing war crimes and genocide in Darfur for decades, particularly against the Masalit people. According to a U.N. report seen by Reuters, 10,000 to 15,000 Masalit civilians were massacred in West Darfur between May and June 2023. 

A 2024 U.N. report found it credible that the UAE was supplying the RSF with weapons under the guise of creating a hospital for Sudanese refugees. UAE officials have said the country bears no responsibility for the conflict in Sudan.

In March, U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., reintroduced the Stand Up for Sudan Act, which would prohibit U.S. arms sales to the UAE until it halts its support for the RSF, claiming that reports they had seen confirmed the UAE’s involvement.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to Prism’s request for comment.

A Sudanese journalist based in the U.S., who asked to remain anonymous, told Prism that despite the reports coming out about the UAE, “it doesn’t seem important enough to affect their relationship between them and the United States, which values strategic alliance in the transactions above lives and the situation in Sudan, unfortunately.”