State Department adds 12 countries to $15,000 visa-bond program

On March 18, 2026, the State Department added 12 countries — Cambodia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Grenada, Lesotho, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, and Tunisia — to its visa-bond program, requiring B-1/B-2 visitor-visa applicants from those nations to post a refundable bond of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 as a condition of issuance, effective April 2, 2026. The addition brought the program to 50 countries, predominantly lower-income states.

Bonded travelers may enter only through commercial airports and are barred from land, sea, charter, and general-aviation ports of entry.

A government should judge visa applicants as individuals rather than penalize them for the passport they hold. By conditioning a visitor visa on a steep cash bond, but only for nationals of a designated list of overwhelmingly lower-income countries in Africa, the Caribbean, Central Asia, and the Pacific, and by funneling those travelers through a narrow set of airports, the policy sorts visitors by national origin and attaches a heavy financial barrier to one group. Singling out disfavored nationalities for heavier burdens is a recognized way that ostensibly neutral rules entrench unequal treatment.

Updates

2026-08-03 — State Department made visa-bond program permanent, raised bond to $20,000 [6, 7]

The State Department finalized a rule making the visa-bond pilot program permanent, effective August 3, 2026, and raised the maximum bond from $15,000 to $20,000 while removing the $5,000 tier. The department cited pilot data showing visa overstays from the 50 covered countries fell from nearly 45,500 in FY2024 to fewer than 50 during the pilot's first ten months.