The Trump administration is expected to issue an executive order as early as Friday establishing a designation for state sponsors of wrongful detention, CBS News has learned, in a move that would allow the U.S. to punish countries that illegally detain U.S. nationals or take them hostage.
The effort is aimed at curbing the number of Americans who elect to travel to such countries, and encouraging the leaders of those countries to immediately free Americans currently held there.
Modeled after the designation of state sponsors of terrorism, the measure would provide tools for the State Department to penalize nations that use detained Americans as political leverage and potentially issue geographic travel restrictions on where a U.S. passport can be used.
The U.S. government does not publicize the number of Americans detained abroad. According to the Foley Foundation, an advocacy group, at least 54 Americans were held hostage or wrongfully detained in 17 countries during 2024.
The State Department currently issues advisories with four levels of risk to advise Americans planning international travel, topped by “Level 4: Do not travel.” There are 21 countries on the “Do Not Travel” list, several of which list wrongful detention as a risk to travelers, including Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Venezuela and North Korea.
The State Department says most U.S. nationals who are arrested overseas are detained due to “legitimate law enforcement and judicial processes.”
In President Trump’s first term, Congress passed the Robert Levinson Act, which says the State Department can find that a U.S. national is being wrongfully detained based on multiple criteria, including the fairness of the country’s judicial system, credible evidence of their innocence or reports that they are being held to extract concessions from the U.S. government.
Levinson, a retired FBI and DEA agent, was kidnapped in Iran in 2007, and the U.S. maintained that he was held wrongfully by the Iranian government. In 2020, U.S. officials said intelligence suggested that he had died.
His daughter, Sarah Levinson, in a statement to CBS News, thanked Mr. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, advisers Adam Boehler and Sebastian Gorka and FBI Director Kash Patel “for sending such a powerful message to stop hostage taking.”
“We have watched in horror as the practice of taking American citizens hostage as political leverage has not only escalated but run rampant by the acts of many rogue nations,” Sarah Levinson wrote, adding, “Our father, Robert Levinson, was wrongfully detained by the Iranian government and ultimately died in Iranian custody after years in captivity. This must never happen again.”
The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The planned executive order follows several high-profile cases in which foreign countries have arrested American citizens on what critics view as flimsy or unsubstantiated charges, before releasing them in exchange for prisoners held in the U.S.
Russian authorities jailed journalist Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan for years on widely criticized espionage charges, and returned them to the U.S. in a complicated 2024 trade that involved the German government returning a convicted murderer to Russia.
Whelan said in a statement that the president’s executive order “is a good start and would be a powerful deterrent if truly enforced against rogue regimes such as China and Russia.” He thanked the CIA and State Department for their work on the cases of those who are wrongfully detained, and he urged Mr. Trump to secure “compensation for those truly wrongfully detained and use frozen assets from the rogue regimes for that purpose.”
“We need to deter the taking of hostages and ensure that once home hostages are taken care of properly. The US government could do much better in both regards,” Whelan also said.
In 2022, WNBA star Brittney Griner was released from a Russian prison on drug charges in exchange for the U.S. freeing notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. And earlier this year, American schoolteacher Marc Fogel was released from a Russian prison in exchange for a Russian crypto fraudster.
Iran and Venezuela have also been involved in U.S. prisoner swaps in recent years.
