Roseanna Hall, the newly crowned Miss Universe Zimbabwe, is leading a cohort of African pageant representatives in a last-ditch effort to secure required travel authorization that would allow them to compete in the 75th annual Miss Universe competition hosted in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, this November. The highly anticipated pageant, which will crown its new winner on 24 November at San Juan’s José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, kicked off pre-event activities on 8 November, with contestants from around the world already arriving for mandatory registration, costume fittings, promotional appearances, and group rehearsals — putting mounting time pressure on Hall and her fellow African peers to finalize their travel plans. In a candid video shared to her official Instagram profile, Hall explained that she has spent weeks shuttling between administrative offices in South Africa, repeatedly following up on her pending U.S. visa application with no final approval to date. “Today was supposed to be my official departure date for Puerto Rico to represent my country on one of the biggest global stages for women,” she shared in the clip, adding in a separate earlier post that “the fight to get Zimbabwe to Puerto Rico continues” amid ongoing uncertainty. Hall is far from the only African contestant caught in this bureaucratic gridlock. Zambia’s national Miss Universe representative, 25-year-old registered nurse Pamela Mubanga, has already been formally forced to withdraw from the international competition entirely, as confirmed in an official public statement from the Miss Universe Zambia organizing body. The statement explicitly clarified that Mubanga’s withdrawal was not tied to gaps in personal documentation, individual eligibility issues, or local organizational missteps, but directly tied to the broad U.S. travel restrictions laid out in Presidential Proclamation 10998, which went into force on 1 January 2026. Zimbabwe is one of 19 nations covered by the sweeping new rules, which suspend the issuance of standard visitor, student, exchange, and immigrant visas for nationals of affected states, while imposing strict new caps on other categories of non-immigrant travel permits. The Zambian pageant leadership further noted that representatives from five additional unnamed African countries are facing nearly identical barriers to securing their travel documentation. Hall echoed that observation in her social media remarks, emphasizing that “I am not alone in this predicament. Some of my African sisters are facing the exact same challenges, and I know exactly what they are going through.” The Miss Universe South Sudan official account also weighed in on Hall’s public update, commenting that their own national contestant’s chances of making it to the Puerto Rico event are a coin flip, at roughly 50/50. The situation marks a notable, high-profile real-world impact of the 2026 U.S. travel restrictions, as a cohort of qualified, pre-selected cultural representatives from across the African continent face the very real possibility of being barred from participating in a globally televised international event due to the broad visa suspension rules.