The Trump Administration’s Suspension of Refugee Resettlement

Among the many first-day executive orders issued by the Trump administration was another attack on refugee resettlement policy in the United States. 

According to the order, refugee admissions would be suspended starting on January 27th. However, implementation took place immediately after the order was issued, stranding more than thousands of refugees who already had travel plans. Well before January 27, the State Department canceled the travel of more than 10,000 refugees set to enter the United States. 

During his last term, Trump based a similar suspension of refugee resettlement on questionable national security grounds. This time, the executive order cites the inability of the United States to manage the strain on resources and security risks brought by the increased flows of migration as its reasoning and does not provide a date on which the suspension will be lifted.

The decades-old US Refugee Resettlement Program (USRAP) is a U.S. government program that works to resettle refugee populations in the United States. Typically, the administration would establish an annual number of how many refugees the United States would resettle that year. While the caps set for resettlement have differed among presidents over the past couple of decades, the belief that the United States had a global responsibility to take in a share of the world’s refugees was largely undisputed. 

The first Trump administration permitted significantly fewer refugees than previous and subsequent administrations. In 2020, the number of refugees admitted into the United States fell to its lowest level of 11,000 in the final year of Trump’s first term compared to 85,000 resettled under the Obama administration in 2016 and a record high of nearly 100,000 during the Biden administration’s final year. In Trump’s last term, thousands of refugees who were scheduled for resettlement in the United States were stuck in refugee camps and kept from reuniting with family. 

Many refugees, especially those still awaiting resettlement, have helped serve U.S. security interests abroad. With resettlement suspended, this could mean life or death for Afghans who worked alongside American military forces against the Taliban. This recent executive order goes against a promise made by both the Trump and Biden administrations to take in Afghan refugees who aided the United States and nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan. There are more than 1,600 Afghans awaiting entry into the United States who are now unable to enter due to the executive order. To add to the severity, Pakistan is threatening to deport the 20,000 Afghans awaiting relocation back to Afghanistan if host governments, such as the United States, do not process their cases soon. Without seeking to offer Afghan refugees asylum, Pakistan has received hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees over the past couple of decades, and the International Organization for Migration has stated that over 795,000 have been deported from Pakistan since September 2023.

There are already efforts at protecting Afghans who aided the United States in light of the suspension. Hundreds of veterans and U.S. officials have signed a letter urging the Trump administration and congressional leaders to continue funding resettlement for Afghans who aided the United States and their families and to approve another 50,000 Special Immigration Visas.

Trump’s order on refugee resettlement not only impacts those seeking refuge in the United States. It will also affect refugee communities within the United States. The administration has suspended federal funding for refugee resettlement agencies within the United States, stripping away the ability for tens of thousands of refugees to access basic necessities, such as housing and food.

The Trump administration has left many refugees with an uncertain fate, both here in the United States and abroad. His second term so far represents a new era of support for refugee resettlement and refugee communities within the United States. Whether the executive order suspending refugee resettlement remains in place and whether the commitment to resettling Afghan refugees in our borders is upheld will bring light to this uncertainty.