Singapore To Block High-Risk Travellers From Boarding Flights And Ships

Singapore will stop entry of high-risk or undesirable travellers who pose a health, security, or immigration threat to the city state from next year by issuing no-boarding directives to transport operators of ships and flights, a media report said Thursday.

Also, 43 per cent more foreigners were refused entry in the first six months of 2025 compared to the same time last year after the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) enhanced border security to identify more high-risk travellers before their arrival.

The ICA plans to roll out the no-boarding directives (NBDs) to prevent arrivals at air checkpoints from 2026 and at sea checkpoints from 2028, The Straits Times reported.

Transport operators who fail to comply with an NBD can be fined up to SGD 10,000.

The move comes in the wake of the Immigration (Amendment) Act that came into force on December 31, 2024.

Singapore, with over six million people of multiple ethnicities, remains sensitive to issues related to ISIS and or even other racial, religious and political-bias elements, according to diplomatic observers here.

On Thursday, the ICA said that while collecting passenger and crew information in advance has been the norm for airline and ship operators, such information is generally not readily available at land checkpoints, involving bus-car-passengers.

The authorities, therefore, are looking into ways to implement similar measures at land checkpoints, according to the daily report.

Meanwhile, enhancements to Singapore’s border security, including through new profiling and detection capabilities, have allowed ICA to identify more high-risk travellers before their arrival to Singapore.

“This has translated into a 43 per cent increase in the number of foreigners refused entry into the prosperous island state in the first half of 2025, compared with the same period in 2024,” the daily said.

People who can be denied entry include those who had been previously barred from entering Singapore after being convicted of certain crimes.

On Thursday, Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said ICA’s transformation comes at a time of increasing volumes of travellers coming into the country.

Shanmugam, who is also Coordinating Minister for National Security, pointed out that traveller volumes through Singapore’s checkpoints increased to 230 million passengers in 2024, compared with the 197 million who passed through the country’s borders in 2015.

The diplomatic observers noted that it is also common for travellers to fly into Malaysia and then take a bus, taxi or car ride to Singapore.

Shanmugam said traveller volume is expected to increase further with the completion of three major infrastructure projects in near future.

Peninsular Malaysia’s southernmost state capital of Johor Bahru-Singapore Rapid Transit System is expected to be operational in December 2026; the Changi Airport Terminal 5 is slated to open by the mid-2030s, and the expansion of Woodlands Checkpoint, a land-border checkpoint, is expected over the next 10 to 15 years, according to the broadsheet report.

“But the limitation is that ICA’s manpower cannot grow indefinitely, so we have been drawing more on technology to cope with this demand and to really navigate the more complex security environment,” the minister said.

To that end, ICA said it has achieved its vision to transform checkpoint clearance operations by becoming among the first border agencies in the world to implement passport-less immigration clearance.

This was part of ICA’s New Clearance Concept that was first announced in 2019, to provide faster and more secure immigration clearance.

All travellers to and from Singapore can now clear immigration in an automated, passport-less process. This involves a facial or iris biometric scan at air and sea checkpoints, or clearance using a QR-code for those travelling through land checkpoints.

As of June 30, ICA said some 93 million travellers have cleared immigration without needing to present their passports.