State Department bans American travel to North Korea starting Sept. 1

An airplane prepares to land.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

The State Department announced Wednesday that starting Sept. 1, U.S. passport holders will be banned from traveling to North Korea, and urged Americans already in the country to leave before then.

The move follows the death of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea before he was sent back to the U.S. in a coma on June 13; he died less than a week later. Tensions are also high between the U.S. and North Korea due to North Korea's testing of several intercontinental ballistic missiles over the last month.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.