⁍ U.S. President Donald Trump’s ban on transactions using popular Chinese messaging app WeChat will cut ties to families and friends in China.

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⁍ WeChat is popular among Chinese students, expats and some Americans who have personal or business relationships in China.

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⁍ The ban will cut off far more than the up to 6 million Chinese people who live in the United States.

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– The latest casualty in the US-China trade war is WeChat, a messaging app popular among Chinese users and some Americans who have personal or business relationships in China. Most popular messaging apps in the US, including Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Telegram have been blocked in China, and Reuters reports that millions of users in the US fear they could be cut off from families and friends there. “I came to the US for free access to information. I feel I’m targeted by Trump,” Tingru Nan, a Chinese graduate student at the University of Delaware, tells Reuters. “I’m living in constant fear now thinking I might get disconnected with friends and families.” In the past three months, WeChat has had an average of 19 million daily active users in the US, according to analytics firms Apptopia. The ban will cut off far more than the 6 million Chinese people who live in the United States. In the past three months, WeChat has had an average of 19 million daily active users in the United States. Some WeChat users have started to share backup contacts for a limited number of apps that are still available in China, including Microsoft Corp’s Skype and LinkedIn. Others plan to do what they do at home to get around the “Great Firewall,” as the blockade of foreign apps in China is known, by using virtual private networks (VPN) that mask a user’s identity on a public network. “When in China I need to use VPN to make Gmail and Instagram work. I’ve never imagined that I need to do similar things in the US,” says Tao Lei, a Philadelphia-based tech worker.