Artan telling the New York Times, external<\/a> he had faced an 11-hour immigration interview and was detained for several hours before be was put on a flight back to Istanbul, Turkey.<\/p>\nSpeaking to BBC World Service, Andrew Giuliani, who leads the White House Task Force on the World Cup, said: “While I can’t go into the derog [derogatory information] on that I can tell you it was the right decision by customs and border patrol and I support that decision.”<\/p>\n
It was not possible for Artan to stay outside the United States and referee matches played in Canada or Mexico, with all on-pitch officials based in Florida for training, preparation, and security.<\/p>\n
Trump placed a full entry ban under any visa category for 12 countries, including Somalia, in June 2025.<\/p>\n
Two days before the World Cup draw in December 2025, Trump drew widespread attention for comments made about Somalia in the lead up to a planned immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota, which has a large Somali community.<\/p>\n
“With Somalia, which is barely a country, you know, they have no anything,” he said. <\/p>\n
“They just run around killing each other. There’s no structure.”<\/p>\n
He added that Somali immigrants should “go back to where they came from” and that the US would “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage to our country”.<\/p>\n
On arriving home, Artan urged Somalia’s youth not to lose hope in their country in the face of his treatment, stating: “Let’s all defend Somalia’s honour. We all belong to Somalia whether it’s bad or good. <\/p>\n
“That flag is ours and so is the passport – let’s defend it.<\/p>\n
“The youth shouldn’t be demoralised about their country. Despite this happening to me, I’ll still stand for my nation.<\/p>\n
“I want to continue my journey from here and urge the youth to do the same.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artan, who was named the Confederation of African Football (Caf) men’s referee of the year in 2025, was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-631021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}