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The Department of Homeland Security has suspended visa-free travel to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for citizens of the People's Republic of China, closing a route that Republican senators have long argued let Chinese nationals reach American soil without a visa and within easy reach of Guam's military bases.
The suspended route is the CNMI Economic Vitality and Security Travel Authorization Program, known as EVS-TAP, created in 2024 as part of the Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program. It allowed Chinese nationals to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands for up to 14 days without a visa or formal admission process. More than 3,000 Chinese nationals entered under the program in fiscal 2025, according to Customs and Border Protection entry-exit data cited in the department's notice.
Homeland Security said it judges that Chinese nationals are almost certainly exploiting the program, pointing to espionage risk near military sites on Tinian and Guam, boat smuggling of Chinese nationals to Guam, birth tourism, and financial crime tied to the islands' former casino industry. The notice cites two smuggling convictions, from March 2024 and February 2025.
The move follows years of pressure from Republican senators. Senators Mike Lee, Rick Scott, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy wrote to Mullin and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum urging the program's termination, warning that it threatened national security and encouraged drug trafficking and birth tourism. They noted that Chinese nationals have been convicted of trafficking methamphetamine into the CNMI, that people entering the islands are close to Guam, a key military hub, and that there have been reports of illegal transport of Chinese nationals from the CNMI to Guam and of China-linked actors targeting Guam's critical infrastructure.
Mullin himself pressed for the change before moving to Homeland Security. In January, when he was still a senator, he joined Scott and Jim Banks in asking the department to require visas for Chinese visitors to the CNMI and to drop Hong Kong from the waiver program, citing reports that births to visiting Chinese mothers rose from fewer than 10 in 2009 to nearly 600 by 2018. Figures cited since put tourist births at 582 in 2018, falling to 58 in 2024 and 47 in 2025.
The suspension is not the end of the argument. CNMI Delegate Kimberlyn King-Hinds has countered that the incidents lawmakers cited involved visitors admitted under the old parole system rather than EVS-TAP, and that tourist births fell 19 percent between 2024 and 2025 after the program began. The department's notice does not say how many visitors overstayed, sought asylum or gave birth, and concedes island businesses will lose money — but says the security standard does not require weighing that against the risk.