Trump Puts Foreign Correspondents On A 240-Day Clock, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A Reporter Could Cover The United States For Longer Than Its Government Cared To Allow

WASHINGTON. Citing the need to restore order to a system that had allowed reporters to remain in the country for as long as they had stories to file, the Department of Homeland Security this week issued a rule ending the decades-old "duration of status" arrangement for foreign journalists and replacing it with a fixed clock, limiting most credentialed correspondents to admissions of up to 240 days and holding Chinese reporters to 90.

Under the previous system, a journalist admitted on a media visa could stay for the length of an assignment, which for foreign bureaus posted to Washington often meant years. The government admitted roughly 37,300 foreign journalists in the 2024 fiscal year, each of them free, until now, to cover the United States without periodically asking the United States for permission to keep doing so.

Under the new rule, a correspondent who wishes to remain past the authorized period may request an extension from the Department of Homeland Security, or may leave the country entirely and apply to come back. In either case, the decision rests with the same administration the correspondent has been assigned to cover, an arrangement officials described as a welcome clarification of a relationship that had grown confusingly independent.

"This simply brings foreign media in line with every other category of visitor," said one senior official, who noted that a reporter unhappy with a 240-day window was always free to file the rest of the story from abroad. The official added that the shorter 90-day period for Chinese nationals reflected heightened security concerns, and declined to say how the department intended to distinguish a national-security risk from a story it did not like.

Press-freedom organizations warned that placing a working journalist's stay at the discretion of the government he reports on invites exactly the leverage the arrangement appears designed to create, a concern the administration did not dispute so much as decline to find troubling. The rule takes effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, pending congressional review, giving the nation's foreign correspondents two months to file ahead of their new expiration dates.

At press time, the White House had clarified that any foreign reporter was welcome to stay in the United States indefinitely, provided the government it covered continued to find that arrangement convenient.