The Trump administration is poised to mount a two-pronged attack on refugee resettlement.
The first prong is quantitative: refugee admissions would be slashed from 125,000 in the fiscal year that just ended to just 7,500. The second is qualitative: selecting who among the world’s 42.7 million refugees would be chosen for rescue.
Historically, the US refugee resettlement program has rescued persecuted people from all racial and religious backgrounds. However, according to documents obtained by the New York Times, the administration may now prioritize resettlement for “refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate.”
What does that mean? Well, the only groups specifically identified are white: Afrikaner South Africans, who have already been prioritized for admission, and now, specifically, Europeans supposedly persecuted because of their “opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”
In other words, the Trump administration will prioritize the immigration of people who oppose the immigration of other people. The racial implications of these policy shifts are clear.
Refugees are defined not only as people with well-founded fears of persecution but also as people who have fled their countries. But have they? US officials looking for 7,500 refugees to resettle will be hard-pressed to find teeming camps in Namibia overflowing with white South Africans or right-wing xenophobes from Germany huddled for safety in Swiss camps. That’s because such camps don’t exist.
Refugee camps do exist, but they primarily hold Myanmar refugees in Bangladesh, Sudanese refugees in Chad, and Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
What has prevented many countries of first arrival from forcibly returning refugees to danger has been third-country resettlement programs that relieve some of the pressure on local host states and remind them that the world is watching.
A prime example is what is happening to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The Washington Post recently reported on Mursal, a 28-year-old Afghan woman who had a protection letter and resettlement offer from the US government. She is one of the many Afghans who Pakistani authorities have forced back into Afghanistan since President Trump suspended resettlement.
Now in hiding, she told the Post: “Everyone knows we worked with the U.S. We fear what will happen if someone informs the Taliban’s intelligence unit.”
It’s bad enough that the refugee lifeline has been cut, but the insertion of non-refugees into the few remaining refugee admission places adds deep insult to even deeper injury.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/10/16/for-the-us-a-180-degree-turn-on-refugees