Chad’s inclusion in the administration’s travel ban has mystified everyone following the story. It was frequently described by those with knowledge of the country and region as “baffling.” It turns out that the reason why the country was included in the ban is remarkably stupid:

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 for the U.S. to properly 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 strictly and literally to countries across the globe, said the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss disagreements within the administration.

The ban as a whole has never made sense, but barring Chad’s citizens from traveling to the U.S. has driven home just how arbitrary and unreasonable the policy is. It is fitting that the cause for adding Chad to the list of banned countries should prove to be something so trivial and absurd as a temporary lack of the right kind of paper. Whatever happens in the courts, there is no doubt that Chad should be immediately removed from the list of countries whose citizens are barred from traveling here, and the administration should extend its apologies to their government for the gratuitous insult.

Joshua Keating comments on the report:

Chad was not previously known as a major source of anti-U.S. terror plots, at least no more than several countries that aren’t on the list, and is in fact considered an important regional counterterrorism partner of the U.S. We now know the answer—and it’s very dumb.

It stands to reason that an administration’s policy process that makes such an egregious error is not very serious or thorough. The decision to include Chad in the ban casts additional doubt on the merits of the entire policy and the competence of the people making it.