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refugees
Data Shows the Only Refugees Legally Settled in the US Since October Have Been White South Africans
"This kind of quota system mirrors the kind of policies that white supremacist groups, including the Klan, pushed for 100 years ago."
Mar 05, 2026
Not a single refugee who isn't a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department's most recent arrivals report.
The report, published last month, shows that from the start of October 2025 and the end of January 2026, just 1,651 people were admitted under the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which allows those fearing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group to apply for refuge in the United States.
Aside from just three, every single one of them was from South Africa.
Three Afghan refugees were also reported to have been settled in Colorado in November. But since then, their admission has been indefinitely suspended, and those who have entered may be at risk of deportation.
During that same period a year earlier—the final months of the Biden administration—a total of 37,596 refugees arrived in the US, with the greatest numbers coming from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
The Trump administration dramatically curbed refugee admissions during its first year in power. On his first day back in office last January, President Donald Trump suspended USRAP processing, leaving around 600,000 people in the pipeline suddenly stranded, including roughly 10,000 who'd already booked flights.
Around 130,000 of those refugees had already been through the State Department's meticulous and taxing vetting process, and were instead "left to languish in refugee camps around the world after being given the promise of safety and a new life in America,” as a group of Democrats in Congress put it.
The next month, however, Trump carved out an exception to the suspension exclusively for white South Africans, who he has falsely claimed face a "genocide," and severe "discrimination" from land redistribution policies intended to correct extreme apartheid-era inequalities.
After previously discussing a cap of 40,000 refugee admissions for the fiscal year 2026---already a reduction by over two-thirds from the Biden administration---Trump announced on September 30 that he would lower admissions to just 7,500, a historic low.
He announced the change without consultation with Congress, which is required under the 1980 Refugee Act, leading Democrats to accuse him of acting in "open defiance of the law."
But in late February, Reuters reported on an internal State Department document showing that the administration was planning to welcome as many as 4,500 white South Africans to the US per month and detailed plans to install trailers on US Embassy property in the country to expedite more immigrant approvals.
All the while, refugees fleeing war, government oppression, and genocide in countries including Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and others have been locked out or face threats of arrest by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under a new policy requiring them to be reinspected to determine their ability for “assimilation.”
Many critics have pointed out the dramatic gulf in treatment between white immigrants from South Africa and members of other, largely nonwhite groups of immigrants, whom it has undertaken extreme measures to remove from the country with expediency.
Last month, a Rohingya refugee, who fled genocide in Myanmar and legally entered the US as a refugee, was found dead on the streets of Buffalo, New York, after being detained and then left outdoors in the freezing cold by immigration agents.
The policy was revealed as part of a case in which a federal judge halted a DHS effort to detain thousands of refugees in Minnesota who did not seek green cards after their first year of residency in the United States.
"While the Trump administration is trying to convert warehouses at home into massive prisons to jail and deport immigrants swept up in its racist crackdown, it is also working to build trailers in Pretoria so it can rapidly increase the number of white South Africans," wrote Ja'han Jones in an opinion piece for MS NOW.
Likening it to the 1924 Immigration Act, which created strict ethnic quotas for entry into the US, Jones said: "It’s the kind of immigration policy the Ku Klux Klan dreamed of. Literally. This kind of quota system mirrors the kind of policies that white supremacist groups, including the Klan, pushed for 100 years ago."
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Nearly Blind Rohingya Refugee Found Dead After Being Stranded by Border Patrol in Freezing Cold
"There must be a full investigation and real accountability from US Customs and Border Protection," said one lawmaker.
Feb 26, 2026
The latest chapter in what one historian called "the ongoing horror story of American immigration enforcement" unfolded in Buffalo, New York this week after Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a 56-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, was released from a county jail where he'd been held for a year.
As Buffalo-based outlet the Investigative Post reported Wednesday, the nearly blind man was found dead on Tuesday evening, five days after US Border Patrol agents who had picked him up from the jail dropped him off at a coffee shop. They neglected to inform his lawyer or family where he was, making it impossible for Shah Alam to find his way home in sub-freezing temperatures.
Shah Alam, who was blind in one eye and had partial, blurry vision in the other, had gotten lost one day in February 2025 and ended up on a woman's porch with a curtain rod he used as a walking stick.
The woman called the police, who ordered Shah Alam to drop his "weapon"—the walking stick—and then Tasered, beat, and arrested him.
Shah Alam, who could not speak English and did not understand the police officers' orders, was charged with assault, trespassing, and possession of a weapon and taken to Erie County Holding Center.
His family, which includes a wife and two sons, chose not to bail him out of the county jail. His arrest had come a month into President Donald Trump's second term, and they feared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement would detain him if he was released and send him to a detention center out of state.
Benjamin Macaluso, an attorney with Legal Aid Bureau who was representing Shah Alam, told the Investigative Post that he had been released on bail last week after reaching a deal with the Erie County District Attorney’s office, agreeing to plead guilty to trespassing and possession of a weapon. The agreement allowed him to avoid detention by federal immigration agents even though authorities had previously placed an immigration detainer on Shah Alam.
Despite that, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office contacted US Border Patrol to pick Shah Alam up from the Holding Center. When the agents determined Shah Alam was not eligible for immigration detention, Border Patrol told the Investigative Post, they "offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop.”
An agency spokesperson claimed the nearly blind man "showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance."
Mohamad Faisal, one of Shah Alam's two sons, told Al Jazeera that his father was not able to read, write, or use electronic devices.
Macaluso told the Investigative Post that Shah Alam's family spent days searching for him in the cold before his body was found. The lawyer also said he had expected Shah Alam to be taken to an ICE detention center in Batavia, New York to be released.
A spokesperson for City Hall in Buffalo told the Investigative Post that homicide detectives were "investigating the circumstances and timeframe of events leading up to his death, following his release from custody," but said homicide and exposure to the elements had been ruled out as the cause of death by a medical examiner.
US Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) was among those who called for a "full investigation" into Border Patrol's decision to leave Shah Alam miles from his home despite his disability.
Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan, a Democrat, accused US Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol, of a "dereliction of duty" and said the agency's treatment of Shah Alam was "inhumane."
"US Customs and Border Protection must answer for how and why this happened," said Ryan. "Buffalo is a city that welcomes refugees and believes government should protect human dignity, not endanger it. US Customs and Border Protection failed that basic standard."
Chuck Park, a Democrat who is running for Congress in New York's 6th District, said the New York for All Act, which would prohibit state and local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration agencies, would have prevented the sheriff's office from calling Border Patrol upon Shah Alam's release.
Alexandre Burgos of the New York State Hate and Bias Prevention Unit invited community members to a gathering to demand accountability to Shah Alam's death.
"We are coming together to demand accountability and transparency in the case of Nurul Amin Shah Alam," reads a flyer for the event, scheduled for Thursday evening at 5:30 pm Eastern at Lafayette High School in Buffalo.
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'Stunning Betrayal': Refugees at Risk of Arrest Under New DHS Memo
"You cannot invite people under one set of rules and move the goalposts after they arrive," said one group, calling for "lawful, humane, consistent treatment of refugees and allies."
Feb 19, 2026
Rights advocates are sounding the alarm over a new US Department of Homeland Security memorandum that puts legal refugees across the United States at risk of arrest as part of President Donald Trump's sweeping anti-immigrant agenda.
The US Department of Justice submitted the memo to a federal judge in the lead-up to a Thursday preliminary injunction hearing about DHS arrests of refugees in Minnesota, where Trump recently sent thousands of immigration agents who were subsequently accused of various acts of violence, including fatally shooting citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
The document was first reported on Wednesday by Law Dork's Chris Geidner, who has unsuccessfully fought to make such filings available remotely. Right now, for this case, they are only available at the federal courthouse in Minnesota.
While the Trump administration claims it is ending "Operation Metro Surge" and removing most Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who have terrorized the Twin Cities, the arrest policy detailed in the memo overhauls a long-standing interpretation of federal law for the entire country.
As American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick laid out on social media Thursday: "Refugees are people vetted overseas by US Refugee Officers through an often yearslong process. They enter the country legally and on a path to citizenship. Refugees are required to apply for a green card one year after they arrive, but they CANNOT apply earlier than that."
The Wednesday memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow and ICE acting Director Todd Lyons states that after being in the country for a year, refugees "must return, or be returned," to DHS custody "for inspection and examination for admission" as a green-card holder, officially called a lawful permanent resident.
"If the refugee does not voluntarily return, DHS will return the individual to custody (i.e., arrest and detain) for this purpose... DHS may maintain custody for the duration of the inspection and examination process," the memo continues, adding that the detention period "is not indefinite, but also is not limited to merely 48 hours."
Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, declared in a Thursday statement that "this unprecedented policy weaponizes a routine administrative milestone as a pretext for detention."
"These are families the United States government already screened more rigorously than any other category of immigrant," she stressed. "Only after years of background checks, biometric screenings, and in-person interviews were they invited to rebuild their lives here. To now subject them to arrest and open-ended detention is a stunning betrayal of both our legal commitments and our moral compass."
DHS is claiming—in the memo and on social media, in response to new reporting—that the Refugee Act of 1980 requires the policy. Reichlin-Melnick emphasized that "reaching this conclusion required overturning decades-old interpretations."
"In a section of the memo that is truly Orwellian, the Trump [administration] says it's REFUGEES who have a 'misguided belief' about the law—even though its policy is a brand new interpretation of a 45-year-old law—and so it's THEIR fault they're traumatized when ICE comes to jail them," he noted.
"Making matters worse, the Trump [administration] is REFUSING to adjudicate green-card applications for refugees who come from one of the 39 countries Trump banned," Reichlin-Melnick added. "So under this policy, a refugee who applies for a green card exactly on time, doing nothing wrong, can be jailed by ICE."
The International Refugee Assistance Project is representing refugees in the Minnesota case. IRAP's vice president of US legal programs, Laurie Ball Cooper, told CNN that "this memo is part of a broad and concerted effort to strip refugees of their legal status and render them deportable... This government will clearly stop at nothing to terrorize refugee communities, and really all immigrants, while trampling over our constitutional rights."
Beth Oppenheim, CEO of HIAS, the world's oldest refugee agency, agreed that "this policy is a transparent effort to detain and potentially deport thousands of people who are legally present in this country, people the US government itself welcomed after years of extreme vetting."
"I have never seen anything like this in my 25 years of refugee protection work," Oppenheim said. "This memo was done in secret, with zero coordination with the organizations that serve refugees. It is a betrayal of our values and our legal commitments, and it will cause extraordinary harm."
Vignarajah also described the memo as "a broad attempt to redefine refugee status as conditional and revocable at will," and argued that "you do not welcome families fleeing war and persecution under one set of rules and then move the goalposts after they arrive."
Calling for "lawful, humane, consistent treatment of refugees and allies," AfghanEvac similarly said on social media that "you cannot invite people under one set of rules and move the goalposts after they arrive."
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