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forced displacement
When Refuge Is Rescinded: Hypocrisy and Our American Dream
The United States cutting off refugee resettlement domestically while waging a war that forces people to flee their homes abroad is a flagrant act of hypocrisy that is incompatible with the American Dream.
May 19, 2026
“Hip hip, hypocrisy! Hip hip, hypocrisy!” My teenage son pumped his fist in the air. I can’t remember the chain of conversation that ultimately produced this sardonic version of “hip hip, hooray!”, but the phrase has quickly become a way to get each other to smile or self-reflect, and it often leads to a bout of shared laughter. But recently, this chant has also allowed me to reflect on the fraught crossroads of my homeland and my emerging life’s work; specifically, the troubling hypocrisy of the United States’ recent actions on two interconnected global issues—forced migration and war.
I grew up in small-town Virginia, in a family that nurtured an honorable form of gratitude-based patriotism. As a doctoral student who studies refugee issues and forced migration, I have long been proud of the United States’ global leadership in refugee resettlement (while also believing that we should do more to support refugees). From the 1980s to early 2000s, the US routinelyresettled more refugees annually than all other nations combined. While this began to shift following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, there were only four years between 2002 and 2022 in which the US did not resettle the most refugees of any country in the world, coming in second to Canada in each of those four years. In 2023, our nation welcomed more than double the number of refugees resettled the previous year, and in 2024, we resettled over 100,000 refugees for the first time in 30 years. But unfortunately, US resettlement took an abrupt turn in 2025.
In an executive order issued on January 20th, 2025—the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term—the Trump presidency announced the suspension of the US refugee resettlement program. Another executive order followed on February 7, identifying South African Afrikaners as a group worthy of resettlement despite unverified claims of race-based persecution and misalignment with the globally recognized definition of refugeehood. Since October 2025, approximately 4,500 Afrikaners and three refugees from Afghanistan have been admitted under the US refugee resettlement program.
At the same time, our country’s leaders have waged war in the Middle East, creating “a new cycle of displacement” that continues to worsen. Whether or not you agree with the rationale behind this war, our country’s actions are increasing forced displacement on a global scale. Recent estimates project that this war has already forced up to 3.2 million Iranians and 1.3 million Lebanese citizens to flee their homes, and this number will almost certainly increase as the conflict continues. Furthermore, areas of the Middle East affected by the current war already host 24.3 million forcibly displaced people. As a scholar-in-training who cares deeply about both forced migrants and the United States, the hypocrisy of cutting off refugee resettlement domestically while acting in ways that force people to flee their homes abroad is excruciating.
The United States is simultaneously closing our doors to refugees and actively increasing the number of forcibly displaced people in the world.
But there’s also a double hypocrisy here, a vocal hypocrisy layered on top of this more tacit one. For years, President Trump has complained that other countries don’t pull their weight in NATO and the US shoulders an oversized portion of defense spending among the alliance. By the same logic, the US should pull our weight in supporting refugees, period—and especially when we are contributing to increases in global forced displacement. “Hip hip, hypocrisy.”
I hear you—don’t we have enough unmet needs among US citizens? Shouldn’t we fix everything in this country before we offer others permanent protection here? While there are many responses to these questions, for me the most compelling is summed up by Rabbi Sharon Braus, who maintains that “ultimately, the problem of the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.”
The figures I’ve presented here are so much more than numbers—each one is a living, breathing person who has loved ones and a favorite color, and who also happens to have survived the harrowing experience of being forced to flee their home due to circumstances entirely outside of their control. Refugees are exceptionally resilient and resourceful people who contribute strength, wisdom, talent, tenacity, (and yes, taxes) to our society, helping us to address our collective needs together. Refugees are part of “we” and “our”—part of [the] “US.”
And yet, the United States is simultaneously closing our doors to refugees and actively increasing the number of forcibly displaced people in the world. The promise of America is not zero-sum—it is generative and generous and transformative. The American Dream I believe in includes not only those of us who were born in the US and have benefited from living here through no virtue of our own, but those who were born elsewhere and have been displaced from their home nations through no fault of their own.
As a future forced migration scholar, a deep longing for my homeland to treat refugees and other forced migrants with compassion, respect, and dignity has become a central feature of my own personal American Dream. Join me and make it an indispensable part of our collective American Dream!
Together, let’s not shy away from this needed and worthy work. Stand with me by imagining what it would be like to start over in a new place, talking about refugees and other migrants in humanizing ways, befriending a newcomer who might benefit from connection, or sharing this op-ed with a friend or loved one who might need to read it. The circle of our family grows as we expand it together, until the day we reach a full-throated “hip hip, hooray!”
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Israel Defense Minister Deploys 'Gaza Model' in Lebanon, Ordering Destruction of Villages
One expert called the policy “an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.”
Mar 23, 2026
Israel is planning to use Gaza as a "model" for its expanding assault on Lebanon, its defense minister said on Sunday as he pledged to begin the demolition of homes in border villages.
In a statement Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israel Defense Forces to "immediately destroy all the bridges over the Litani River that are used for terrorist activity, in order to prevent the passage of Hezbollah terrorists and weapons southward."
He also said he'd ordered the military to "accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes in the border villages in order to thwart threats to the Israeli settlements—in accordance with the Beit Hanoun and Rafah model in Gaza."
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, described the invocation of this "Gaza model" as "an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing" in Lebanon.
The two cities Katz referred to were largely wiped off the map during the Gaza genocide.
Beit Hanoun, a city on the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip, which once had a population of more than 50,000 people, had nearly all of its structures totally "flattened" by Israel's bombing and was totally depopulated, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in mid-2025. The far-right in Israel has pushed for Jewish Israeli settlers to move in and build settlements on the territory.
Rafah has been similarly devastated, with nearly 70% of the structures "wiped out" according to an October 2025 investigation by the Center for Information Resilience.
At the time that Israeli forces moved into Rafah in mid-2024, it was the last refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians who'd been displaced from their homes elsewhere in the strip. UN experts described the attack on Rafah as a culmination of a monthslong campaign to “forcibly transfer and destroy Gaza’s population," with more than 800,000 people being forced to flee.
Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Katz's announcement demonstrated "an intent to forcibly displace residents, destroy civilian homes, and conduct strikes that could target civilians" in Lebanon as well.
Already, more than 1 million civilians in Lebanon, from the area south of the Litani River and in Beirut's southern suburbs, have become displaced following orders from the Israeli military to evacuate their homes.
Katz has said hundreds of thousands of Shiite civilians will be forbidden from returning from their south of the Litani "until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed," and he has said Israel “will not hesitate to target anyone who is present near Hezbollah members, facilities, or means of combat.”
Human Rights Watch has said these indefinite displacements raise the concern that Israel is perpetrating the war crime of forced displacement and doing so based on religion.
“The Israeli military does not get to decide when civilians lose protections afforded by international law, nor should it be allowed to prevent displaced residents from returning to their homes based on some undefined ‘safety’ standard,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. Deliberately targeting civilians, civilian objects, and others protected under international law would be a war crime, and countries supplying Israel with weapons need to realize they are risking complicity in war crimes too.”
Since the latest outbreak of hostilities at the beginning of March following the launch of the US-Israeli war against Iran, at least 1,024 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli attacks, including 79 women and 118 children, according to a report from Lebanese authorities this weekend.
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have "destroyed hundreds of homes and civilian infrastructure, including healthcare facilities."
“For over two years, Israel’s allies and European states that purport to support and uphold human rights have buried their heads in the sand as atrocities continue in Lebanon, as in Gaza,” Kaiss said. “Atrocities flourish when there is impunity, and other countries should no longer stand by as they continue.”
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'This Madness Has to Stop': Israeli Airstrike Totally Collapses Beirut Apartment Building
"All of Beirut shook," said one resident who was forced to take shelter in the city after an Israeli displacement order forced her from her home in the suburbs.
Mar 18, 2026
An Israeli airstrike totally demolished a large apartment building in central Beirut on Wednesday, following a night of attacks on densely populated residential areas, several of which reportedly came without warning.
Videos shared to social media and by local media outlets show the 10-story building, located in the Bachoura neighbourhood in central Beirut, suddenly collapsing into rubble in the early hours of the morning after being struck with a missile.
Israeli authorities issued a forced displacement order to residents of the building over social media around 4 am local time, roughly an hour before the strike. It warned residents of buildings in the Bachoura area that they were "located near Hezbollah facilities" and needed to move at least 300 meters away.
Israel has claimed the building was used by the militant group Hezbollah to stash large sums of money, but has provided no evidence publicly.
Citing Lebanon's Health Ministry, the Associated Press reported that at least four people were wounded in the attack, which sent emergency teams rushing to the scene through a plume of black smoke.
Residents of the collapsed apartment building have taken to social media to describe their horror at seeing their home suddenly destroyed.
"I am a US citizen and surgeon who took care of the Boston Marathon bombing victims in 2013," said Haytham Kaafarani, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. "I paid for seven years to own a small apartment in downtown Beirut for my three kids to enjoy summers there. Today, Israel reduced my dream home to rubble, with American weapons, paid by my taxes."
Another professor, Bilal R. Kaafarani, who teaches chemistry at the American University of Beirut, said something similar.
"Israel demolished the building I have an apartment in. It took 22 years of my work here and 20 years of my wife’s work to own this apartment," he said. "This madness has to stop."
The attack came after a night of intense airstrikes upon civilian areas in Lebanon's capital, which reportedly came without warning in the middle of the night and into the early morning.
According to Lebanese authorities, at least 20 people were killed in a series of attacks on Beirut and the southern and eastern parts of the country, while dozens more were injured.
Lebanon's health ministry reported that more than 900 people have been killed and 2,200 injured in Israel's latest round of attacks in Lebanon, which began on March 2 after Hezbollah retaliated against the US-Israeli war in Iran.
The attacks beginning Tuesday night came less than a day after Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that "deliberately attacking civilians or civilian objects amounts to a war crime,” noting that hundreds of homes and other civilian infrastructure, including health facilities, had been destroyed by prior Israeli attacks in Beirut.
Israel has issued evacuation orders that have forced more than 1 million Lebanese people from their homes as part of an expanding ground invasion into southern Lebanon.
Sara Saleh, a 29-year-old taking shelter in a nearby school after being forced from her home in Beirut's southern suburbs, told the Agence France-Presse that she and her family "were asleep" when Israel's warning came down early Wednesday morning. She said they were left to flee for safety in their pajamas.
She said the attack on the apartment "was terrifying... all of Beirut shook." Speaking with a face mask to protect herself from dust kicked up by the demolished building, she said her sister's children "started crying and panicking, it was heartbreaking."
The mass displacement of civilians in Lebanon and Iran has been met with increasing criticism from UN experts and human rights organizations.
As reports of the apartment bombing rolled in, Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that "international law is being openly ignored" and that "impunity reigns and disproportionate actions are being normalized amid the escalating conflicts in the Middle East."
"It is a vicious circle," he said. "The more violations, the stronger the culture of impunity becomes."
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