President-elect Donald Trump has promised to halt refugees from coming to the US in his second term — a promise that will largely be within his power as president to keep.
Trump has said he plans to “suspend refugee admission, stop the resettlement, and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country” on his first day back in office. The rules for refugee admissions were established by Congress, including in the 1980 Refugee Act, but also via legislation directly following World War II. Therefore, any effort to formally end the refugee program would take an act of Congress. However, the president has lots of authority over refugee admissions — and Trump exercised that authority during his first term.
It is up to the president to decide how many refugees will be allowed to enter the US in any given year, and Trump significantly lowered the cap on refugee admissions during his first term. Presidents can also pause admissions, as President George W. Bush did in the wake of 9/11.
“Every president has used their powers to either expand or contract as circumstances might fit,” Eric Welsh of Reeves Immigration Law Group told Vox. “It’s something that is very, very susceptible to his influence.”
Given how significantly Trump eroded the US’ refugee program during his first term, it’s not unreasonable to fear that he would do even more damage this time around. While there are technically legal limits to how much Trump can do to dismantle the refugee program, there is plenty the administration could do practically to gut it.
How does the US refugee system work?
Refugees are migrants hoping to escape threats and extreme conditions in their home country to settle in a safe country, in this case the US.
To be classified as a refugee, migrants must go through a vetting process while they are outside the US. Potential refugees are typically first screened by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and then by the US government. After they pass the vetting process, they then receive visas to come to the US, where they are assisted with basics like finding housing, getting children enrolled in school, and signing up for government benefits by the US Refugee Admissions Program.
Refugees can work once they’re in the US, and can apply for US citizenship when they have legal status in the US.
What did Trump do in his first term?
The first time he took office in 2017, Trump paused the refugee admissions for three months.
“The justification was to determine if [the US refugee program] was safe and secure because of alleged security risks,” Welsh said. Trump also barred Syrians from the refugee resettlement program indefinitely; Syrians were not accepted again until 2018.
“And then he kicked that a step further with the Muslim ban, by specifically banning [refugee] applicants from certain countries” — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, Welsh said. The Supreme Court allowed a version of that ban to stand following more than a year of litigation.
Trump also greatly reduced the overall number of refugees allowed into the US over the course of his first term. For example, Trump set a ceiling of only 15,000 refugees for 2021; under Biden, that number has grown to 125,000 for this past year.
What else can Trump do to the refugee program in a second term?
Given his first-term actions to limit refugees, refugee advocates are concerned Trump will go further this next term — and there are several things he could do to increase pressure on the refugee program.
First, he has promised to freeze the program as he did his first term, but it’s not clear for how long the process would be paused or what the justification would be. He could also institute something similar to the 2017 travel ban, Welsh said.
“The concern is, this time around — with four years to think about it — Trump would try and do [a travel ban] again and do it better, because he has so much authority in this arena,” Welsh told Vox.
Of course, Trump could also simply lower the ceiling for how many refugees are permitted into the US on a yearly basis, as he did during his first term.
There are administrative ways Trump and his government could hollow out the program, too, Chris Opila, staff attorney at the American Immigration Council, told Vox.
“The Trump administration could elect to reallocate refugee officers to different tasks, such as asylum within the United States, or credible fear proceedings at the border and sort of pull adjudicative resources away,” Opila said.
Under the previous Trump administration, “with the [federal] resettlement agencies, some of the changes caused them to close some of their offices. And I think that some of what we can anticipate would be similar in terms of measures that slow processing and limit the number of people who can come in,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney with the Migration Policy Institute, told Vox.
Ultimately, Welsh said, Trump is unpredictable, and it’s impossible to say what he will or won’t do come January. But if his first term is any indication, refugees hoping to come to the US could face an increasing number of obstacles to a safe future.
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