The US State Department designated former Argentine president Cristina Elisabet Fernandez de Kirchner and her former minister of planning Julio Miguel De Vido as ineligible to enter the US on Friday, claiming that they had been involved in “significant corruption.” The entry ban affects both Kirchner and De Vido and their immediate families.

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Kirchner and De Vido abused their offices by orchestrating multiple bribery schemes involving public works contracts, stealing millions of dollars from the Argentine government. Rubio claims that the actions undermined people’s and investors’ confidence in Argentina’s future.

The designations were made under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2024, which requires the Secretary of State to “publicly or privately designate foreign officials and their immediate family members” as ineligible for entry into the US, where the secretary has credible information that the foreign officials were involved in “significant corruption,” or a “gross violation of human rights.”

Kirchner was convicted in 2022 on charges of “fraudulent administration to the detriment of public administration” for awarding contracts to a friend in exchange for bribes, for which she was sentenced to six years in prison. An appeals court confirmed the ruling in 2024. Meanwhile, De Vido was found guilty in 2018 of the same crime for his responsibility in the 2012 Bueno Aires rail disaster in which 51 people died.

For her part, Kirchner vehemently denied the charges and denounced the charges against her as politically motivated, brought by a “parallel state and…judicial mafia.”