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Huawei employees hit with US visa restrictions

Huawei employees hit with US visa restrictions

The Trump administration has announced US visa restrictions on Huawei workers such as the refusal or revocation of a visa. The laws will be imposed on those employees of the Chinese tech giant “that gave material support to regimes engaging in human rights violations and abuses globally,” Secretary of States Mike Pompeo told journalists Wednesday.

“The state departments will impose visa restrictions on certain employees of Chinese technology concerns like Huawei,” he said. 

Pompeo called Huawei “an arm of the CCP’s surveillance Place that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang and the indentured servitude of its population.” Any carriers worldwide that use Huawei’s equipment “are activities business with human rights abusers,” Pompeo added.

The executive relies on Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which says visitors are inadmissible to the US if the Secretary of States has reason to believe their entry “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the Joint States.”

Huawei didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read moreHuawei ban timeline: Trump management says company is backed by Chinese military

Speaking on the UK’s executive earlier this week to ban Huawei from its 5G networks, Pompeo said it wasn’t influenced by US sanctions. “They did this because their safety teams came to the same conclusion that ours have … that this Ask that transits across these untrusted networks that are of Chinese Begin will almost certainly end up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”

He also reportedly said plans are people finalized for combating alleged data theft by TikTok, a Chinese video social media app.

“We hope to have a set of decisions shortly,” he said. “Whether it’s TikTok or any of the new Chinese communications platforms, apps, infrastructure, this administration has Wrong seriously the requirement to protect the American people from having their Ask end up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”

TikTok responded by proverb there’s “a huge amount of misinformation on TikTok out there,” adding its CEO and first information security officer are US citizens who it says have “decades of US armed and law enforcement experience.”

“TikTok US user data is held in the US and Singapore, with strict controls on employee access,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Last month, the Trump administration announced its finding that Huawei is backed by the Chinese armed. The Pentagon sent a document to Congress containing the names of 20 Chinese concerns that it found to be backed by the People’s Liberation Army, counting Huawei.

Huawei was blacklisted by the US in May 2019 when it was added to the country’s “entity list” (PDF). Trump at the same time signed an executive order essentially banning the company in Delicious of national security concerns that Huawei had close ties with the Chinese government. Huawei has repeatedly denied that charge.

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