Donald Trump has installed an attorney and part-time beauty salon owner to decide which foreigners are allowed to enter the U.S.
The State Department announced that Mora Namdar has been promoted from her post working on U.S foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa to become assistant secretary for consular affairs, overseeing everything from passport issuance to visa approvals and revocations.
Namdar, who is the daughter of Iranian immigrants, previously did the job on an interim basis during Trump’s first term in 2020.
Namdar, 46, owns a mini-chain of beauty salons called Bam in her native Texas, with locations in the West Village in her hometown of Dallas, as well as in Fort Worth and Plano.
The original salon, she told Voyage Dallas magazine, was intended to be “gorgeous, sophisticated, and evoke dreams of a Parisian heaven in Dallas,” with a 20-foot flower wall, and grew out of her friends asking her to their makeup at their weddings. “It dawned on me that there is a need for a gorgeous place that treats the styling of women like a form of art,” she said, while she told DMagazine in 2017 that it was “fun and cheeky.” Blowouts start at $45 and professional make-up sessions at $55.
The chain has diversified into hair extensions, starting at $325, events, off-site events, including running lash and braid bars for $100-a-person and home visits.
Namdar combined owning the salon with running a one-woman law firm. On Christmas Day she announced it was no longer active.
She was also one of the contributors to the notorious Project 2025, which has heavily influenced Trump’s second term, writing a section about the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
In it, Namdar accused USAGM—the federal umbrella for U.S.-funded broadcasters including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe—of serious mismanagement, “espionage-related security risks,” and of using “anti-U.S. talking points to parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda,” while calling for it to be reformed or closed altogether.
Namdar’s Senate confirmation earlier this month now puts a politically connected operator with media experience in charge of a bureau that can effectively decide who gets to enter the United States—and who gets turned away.
In prepared testimony for her October Senate hearing, she framed visa adjudications as critical to national security, saying she concurred with Rubio’s assessment that if someone “undermine[s] our foreign policy, [then] consular officers have the authority to revoke their visa.”
Namdar’s record inside government has already drawn scrutiny. Several outlets have reported that her interim leadership in the State Department’s Near Eastern affairs bureau this year triggered internal concerns about management and morale.
She will now be leading moves by the administration to ban people entering the U.S. including actions against citizens of various European countries who the president, 79, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 54, announced on Wednesday had been barred from entering the U.S. for what it described as “egregious” censorship of “American viewpoints” on social media platforms, promising more would likely follow.
Trump repeatedly sought to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign. But by year’s end, PBS reported that outside trackers estimate the administration has implemented roughly half the agenda’s goals, with “personnel is policy” hires—like Namdar, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr—singled out as a key mechanism.
The FCC is the independent regulator that oversees broadcast licensing, telecom, and a growing share of the government’s fights over media power and “viewpoint” disputes.
Carr, 46, authored Project 2025’s FCC chapter, which argues the agency should take a more aggressive posture toward “Big Tech” and what he calls a “censorship cartel,” while pairing that culture-war agenda with an explicit push to roll back swaths of existing telecom regulation.
Since taking the job, Carr has moved in ways that critics say align with those priorities—steps that have triggered Senate blowback and warnings from former FCC leaders about speech-chilling politicization.
The Daily Beast has contacted the State Department and Namdar for comment.
