Congress pushes Trump to sanction Egypt over jailed US citizen’s death

Congress is pressuring President Donald Trump to implement legally mandated sanctions on Egyptian officials following the death of a US citizen this week after more than six years of detention in a Cairo prison.

Mustafa Kassem, a diabetic, died of a heart attack on Monday stemming from his yearlong hunger strike in protest of his incarceration. Lawmakers immediately clamored for the Trump administration to place visa bans on Egyptian officials involved in his detention, as required under the government funding bill the president signed into law last month.

“The State Department should immediately implement our provision to prevent foreign officials involved in the wrongful detention of American citizens from entering the United States, especially following the tragic death of Mustafa Kassem,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who introduced the bipartisan sanctions measure in the Senate foreign aid spending bill last year, told Al-Monitor. “Egypt’s long history of unjustly detaining American citizens and nationals is exactly why we singled it out in our bill.”

Van Hollen and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, sent a letter to Trump today calling on him to ban Egyptian officials involved in Kassem’s detention and death from entering the United States.