President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday regarding the way the U.S. government handles Americans detained abroad.
The new order, titled “Bolstering Efforts to Bring Hostages and Wrongfully Detained United States Nationals Home,” provides relevant agencies with more leeway to share sensitive information to family members of Americans wrongfully detained abroad, in addition to allowing such departments to sanction the people and entities responsible.
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It “expands the tools available to deter and disrupt hostage-taking and wrongful detentions,” a fact sheet from the White House reads. “It creates new ways to impose costs on terrorist organizations, criminal groups, and other malicious actors who take hostages for financial, political, or other gains and thus threaten the integrity of the international political system and the safety of U.S. nationals and other persons abroad.”
The executive order draws on the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, which Congress passed in 2020, and it codifies how the U.S. government handles international kidnappings and arrests.
Various nonprofit groups, including the Foley Foundation, say there are roughly 60 Americans who are wrongfully detained or held hostage abroad, while the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, the office within the State Department that is the administration’s lead hostage negotiator, does not share its number publicly.
Many of the families of those Americans have created the Bring Our Families Home Campaign, and they will be in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday for the unveiling of a mural dedicated to those detained.
The White House “summoned families to a last-minute call they insisted keep off the record” as a way to “pre-manage the press attention from the many hostage families being in D.C. this week,” according to BOFH campaign spokesman Jonathan Franks.
“They then held a one-way conversation with families, where the talk and chat functions were disabled, and didn’t seem to realize how triggering it might be for families to literally be silenced during a call like this,” he added. “As we always try to, we provided the White House with a simple plan for engaging with families more than a week ago. Instead, the White House is taking executive action to direct itself to follow existing law. The families continue to await a reply to their requests for meetings with President Biden.”
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Biden’s executive order also introduces a new risk indicator for the State Department’s travel advisories, which are meant to inform the public about the risks posed by traveling to various countries.
Burma, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela have received the “D” rating, which “highlight[s] the elevated risk that Americans face … and provide[s] Americans with comprehensive safety and security information with which to make informed travel decisions,” according to a senior administration official.
