How Chad wound up on the travel ban list: a lack of paper to show its papers are good

WASHINGTON — This is the story of how an office supply glitch became a major irritant between the United States and one of its close security partners.

When President Donald Trump added the African nation of Chad last month to his most recent installment of travel restrictions, everyone from the Pentagon to Chad’s leaders to the French government was perplexed.

The U.S. has praised Chad’s cooperation on counterterrorism, especially its campaign against a vicious Boko Haram insurgency spilling over from Nigeria.

As it turns out, a seemingly pedestrian issue was largely to blame: Chad had run out of passport paper.

Chad and every other country had been given 50 days to prove it was meeting a “baseline” of security conditions the Trump administration says is needed to screen potential visitors.

One condition was that countries provide a recent sample of its passports so that the Homeland Security Department could analyze how secure they really are.

Lacking the special passport paper, Chad’s government couldn’t comply, but offered to provide a pre-existing sample of the same type of passport, several U.S. officials said. It wasn’t enough to persuade Homeland Security to make an exception to requirements the agency has been applying, said the officials, who requested anonymity.

Still, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said at the time that Chad could come off the list “maybe in a couple of months.”