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Amid Warnings of Atrocities in Sudan, Van Hollen Says Senate 'Missed Opportunity' to Cut Off Arms to UAE
"The United States shouldn't just be talking about ending the slaughter in Sudan," the senator said. "We should actually be using our leverage."
Jun 24, 2026
After the US State Department warned earlier this week of imminent “atrocities” by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Tuesday criticized the US Senate for missing a recent opportunity to cut off weapons to the United Arab Emirates, which has supplied the genocidal paramilitary group.
On Monday, the State Department warned that RSF forces were massing near the city of El-Obeid and could commit “mass atrocities” against civilians if allowed to take the city.
"The belligerents must uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect civilians and ensure that those seeking safety can do so without fear or obstruction," the department said.
The statement echoed concerns expressed last week by a coalition of states at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which said that roughly 500,000 civilians, including more than 100,000 displaced people, could be at risk of violence if RSF escalated its assault.
UN human rights experts have said RSF's October offensive in Darfur bore the "hallmarks of genocide," with more than 6,000 people killed and numerous civilians tortured, raped, and starved during a three-day rampage across the city of El-Fasher.
But while Trump's State Department has sanctioned some entities accused of supplying fighters for the RSF, the Monday statement made no mention of the UAE, which rights groups point out is the group’s principal foreign backer.
A report issued last year by Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) found that the UAE was continuing to provide weapons to the RSF despite telling the US that it was not.
Following previous failed attempts at pushing Congress to impose an arms embargo on Sudan through standalone legislation, Van Hollen attempted to do so again last week by tacking a pair of amendments onto the bipartisan PEACE in Sudan Act, which requires the State Department to assess designating armed Sudanese groups as terrorists and allows Trump to impose optional sanctions on foreign actors funding the war, but stopped short of introducing any hard leverage.
At a markup session for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, Van Hollen introduced an amendment banning the US from selling or transferring military equipment to the UAE as long as it continues supporting the RSF. The amendment failed in a 15-7 vote, with four Democrats—Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Chris Coons (Del.), Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), and Jacky Rosen (Nev.)—joining every Republican on the committee, aside from Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), in opposition.
A second amendment, which did not single out the UAE specifically but restricted arms sales to any country arming either side of the conflict, also failed 13-9, but received support from Shaheen and Rosen.
Coons said he'd have "enthusiastically" supported the amendment, but voted no because he believed it would "bring down" the broader Sudan bill in a GOP-controlled Senate. Duckworth did not explain her reasoning for voting no.
In light of the State Department's warning this week about RSF's march toward El-Obeid, Van Hollen told a Drop Site News reporter on Tuesday that he believed the no vote on his amendments "was a missed opportunity."
"The United States shouldn't just be talking about ending the slaughter in Sudan. We should actually be using our leverage," he said.
Noting that Trump likely would not support a restriction on arms to the UAE given his extensive financial entanglements with the Emiratis and his previous policy of fast-tracking weapons to the country without any strings attached, Van Hollen said his goal was simply to "keep the pressure on."
He said, "We need to keep showing the hypocrisy of the Trump administration policy, where they claim they want to do something but refuse to take some of the basic actions we can take as a country."
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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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'Middle Finger to the LGBTQ Community': Trump Halts US Commemoration of World AIDS Day
The move came on the heels of a report detailing how the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts set off a crisis in global AIDS response efforts.
Nov 28, 2025
The Trump administration drew outrage this week for ending formal US commemoration of World AIDS Day, directing US State Department officials to "refrain from publicly promoting" it through social media or other communication channels.
The decision was reported after the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) released an analysis detailing the harms done by the Trump administration's sweeping foreign assistance cuts.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration temporarily halted HIV-related funding, sending global response efforts into "crisis mode," USAID said. Though President Donald Trump ultimately dropped a proposal to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the administration's throttling of funds forced clinics to shut down and disrupted key community programs, the report states.
"The funding crisis has exposed the fragility of the progress we fought so hard to achieve,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS. “Behind every data point in this report are people—babies and children missed for HIV screening or early HIV diagnosis, young women cut off from prevention support, and communities suddenly left without services and care. We cannot abandon them. We must overcome this disruption and transform the AIDS response."
In its reporting on the Trump administration's decision to halt official commemoration of World AIDS Day, which is on December 1, the New York Times pointed to studies suggesting that "cuts by the United States and other countries could result in 10 million additional HIV infections, including one million among children, and three million additional deaths over the next five years."
Today, @realDonaldTrump gave a middle finger to the LGBTQ community. His deplorable cancellation of World AIDS Day commemoration was unconscionable and unforgivable. This action was fueled by raw bigotry and fealty to his Project 2025 masters.
FIGHT.https://t.co/PcyduBcbkI
— Truth Wins Out (@truthwinsout) November 26, 2025
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), head of the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, said in a statement that "silence is not neutrality; it is harm."
"I'm calling on the administration to immediately reverse this decision and recommit our fight against HIV/AIDS," he added.
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