A lawmaker representing West Virginia’s Second District in the United States House of Congress, Rep Riley M. Moore, has written to President Donald Trump, asking the US government to immediately designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concerns, CPC.
The letter dated October 6, 2025, and addressed to Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, US Department of State in Washington DC.
In the letter, the lawmaker urged the US government to immediately halt sales of arms and all associated technical support to Nigeria until the “Nigerian government demonstrates that it is sufficiently committed to ending the reign of persecution and slaughter”.
Moore claimed that from January to September 2025 alone, no fewer than 7,000 Christians have been gruesomely murdered by “Muslim extremist groups”.
He alleged that at least 250 Catholic Priests have been attacked or killed across the country since 2015, stressing that “between Boko Haram uprising in 2009 and 2025, 19,100 churches in Nigeria have been attacked or destroyed”.
US Senator Sen. Ted Cruz, also alleged that Nigeria is witnessing a “Christian genocide”. He introduced legislation in September that would require the Trump administration to adopt the CPC designation in addition to imposing targeted sanctions against Nigerian government officials who facilitate or permit jihadist attacks against Christians and other religious minorities.
Under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998, the U.S president must designate countries that engage in or tolerate “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” as CPCs. Violations include torture, prolonged detention without charges, and forced disappearence, according to the State Department.
“Nigerian Christians are being targeted and executed for their faith by Islamist terrorist groups and are being forced to submit to sharia law and blasphemy laws across Nigeria,” Cruz said in a statement announcing a bill he named the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025.
“It is long past time to impose real costs on the Nigerian officials who facilitate these activities, and my Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act uses new and existing tools to do exactly that,” Cruz said, adding: “I urge my colleagues to advance this critical legislation expeditiously.”
Republican Sens. Ted Budd of North Carolina, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and James Lankford of Oklahoma endorsed redesignating Nigeria in a Sept. 12 letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Budd posted on X.
Legislation is not likely to move forward until Congress settles an impasse over funding that has shut down the government for nearly a week. The State Department is expected to break its two-year moratorium on CPC designations later this year, likely in December.
The last CPC designations were made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in December 2023, when Blinken revoked Nigeria’s CPC designation that was put in place by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2020.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey, introduced legislation in March calling for Nigeria’s redesignation “for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.”
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Similarly, the USCIRF also recommended the State Department designate Nigeria as a CPC in its latest update on religious freedom in the country in late July.
“Twelve state governments and the federal government enforce blasphemy laws, prosecuting and imprisoning individuals perceived to have insulted religion,” the USCIRF said in its report, adding: “Despite efforts to reduce violence by nonstate actors, the government is often unable to prevent or slow to react to violent attacks by Fulani herders, bandit gangs, and insurgent entities such as JAS/Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).”
The latest congressional effort to bring about the designation comes as testimonies of Nigerians kidnapped by jihadist Fulani herdsmen have revealed that hundreds of Christians are still being held by the Islamist group in the infamous Rijana Forest in the southern part of Nigeria’s Kaduna state, ACI Africa, CNA’s news partner in Africa, reported on Oct. 1.
But the Federal Government had since dismissed the report, stating that the deteriorating security situation in the country does not target a particular religion.
The Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Media and Public Communication, Sunday Dare, in a recent statement, described the allegations as false, misleading and capable of inciting division.
According to him, the foreign commentators were “orchestrating wild allegations about unproven ongoing genocide” in Nigeria and urged Nigerians and the international community to reject attempts to “robe the country with a garment that is not hers”.