Resettled refugees face renewed Trump administration scrutiny

Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, was on a call with colleagues on Monday when a former co-worker texted him an article. It cited a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services memo that said the agency plans to review the cases of—and possibly re-interview—all the refugees brought into the United States during former President Joe Biden’s time in office.

“I’m sort of scanning my phone and reading this and realizing, ‘Wow, this is a big deal,’” Soerens said.

According to the Friday memo, which WORLD reviewed, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow directed the agency to begin reviewing the cases for every refugee who entered the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program between January 2021 and February 2025. Potentially, all of those individuals could be subject to another interview with USCIS personnel like the one they already had to complete to enter the country. The memo also said the agency would stop all green card processing for refugees who arrived in that timeframe.

Soerens and others in the refugee advocacy community argue that the USCIS policy laid out in the memo will retraumatize people who have already gone through years of security vetting. But the Trump administration and others say that the Biden administration cut corners in refugee admissions processes that could have put U.S. national security at risk. Meanwhile, supporters and critics alike remain uncertain about how exactly USCIS’ planned review of the cases will work.

Daniel Salazar, refugee and protection policy adviser at Global Refuge, was at home in Austin, Texas, for the Thanksgiving holiday when he learned about the new USCIS policy.

“Seeing flights canceled for refugees [last] January who were already approved and already booked here was one kind of betrayal,” Salazar said. “And this is kind of a whole other level to that. When these are individuals who have already arrived, who’ve already been welcomed and supported by local partners, by congregations, et cetera—for them to be thrust into this sort of uncertainty is really heart-wrenching.”

Refugees coming through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program go through intensive biometric and security checks and interviews with USCIS personnel before they ever set foot in the country. Once they arrive in the United States, they go through more intensive security checks with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Salazar explained.

Soerens also stressed the thoroughness of the screening process. “It’s been an incredibly effective overseas vetting process that often takes multiple years to complete,” he said. “The employees of the U.S. government who are not partisan, who are career officials, are verifying first and foremost that a refugee meets the legal definition of a refugee under U.S. law. … And then also, of course, verifying that they don’t present any sort of public safety threat or public health threat.”

In some cases, it’s possible they were facing persecution for something other than their faith. But Soerens said that most of the refugees who came into the United States under the Biden administration were Christians.

“In many cases, it’s a reasonable inference, if you’re a Christian coming from a country like Burma or Afghanistan or Iraq, that that is a primary factor in why you’re facing persecution,” he said. During the four years of the Biden administration, roughly 70,000 Christian refugees came to the United States from the countries where Christians face the most severe persecution in the world.

But USCIS claims that, for the past few years, the program hasn’t been thorough enough.

“For four straight years, the Biden administration accelerated refugee admissions from terror and gang-prone countries, prioritizing sheer numbers over rigorous vetting and strict adherence to legal requirements,” said Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement provided to WORLD. “This reckless approach undermined the integrity of our immigration system and jeopardized the safety and security of the American people. Corrective action is now being taken to ensure those who are present in the United States deserve to be here.”

Nayla Rush, a senior researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, has previously raised concerns that the Biden administration was bringing in people who didn’t legally meet the definition of “refugees.”

The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is designed to help those in the worst situations first, she told WORLD. The program works with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to help people who have fled to a new country due to persecution, only to find that they are still in danger in that new country, she said.

“These people would need to be resettled, meaning they need to be taken away from the country where they sought refuge in and brought to another country where they can start a life and become citizens of that country,” Rush said.

The UNHCR would examine those individuals and then refer them to the United States, which could, in light of its own considerations, bring those people in as refugees. But Rush said that, even before Biden took office, refugee referrals didn’t always make sense.

“I used to wonder how these people were picked by the UN for resettlement. I mean, how do you decide this person stays, this person goes?” she said. “I felt that somehow we were playing God as in deciding who should have the better life here and who should stay behind.”

Under Biden, things got even worse, according to Rush. She pointed to the administration’s Welcome Corps program, which she argued allowed individuals to enter the United States as though they were refugees, even if the UNHCR didn’t think they qualified as such.

“What the Biden administration did was kind of reshuffle all the cards and allowed people who didn’t even have refugee status to be resettled or referred for resettlement here,” Rush said.

She also said that USCIS often relies on other organizations to vet individuals before it talks with them.

“When USCIS goes to interview the person, it’s just one interview, one time, just to confirm all the information that they have about the refugee information that is given to them by [nongovernmental organizations],” Rush said.

But the roughly 200,000 people who entered the United States through the USRAP program during the Biden administration were thoroughly vetted, Soerens argued. Organizations like the International Refugee Assistance Project have documented how USRAP’s multi-agency vetting process has sometimes been so stringent that it falsely flags individuals as being a threat who aren’t.

Now, certain individuals who’ve already made it through that process may have to go through it again, Soerens said. But that’s not his only concern about the memo.

USCIS Director Edlow also ordered the agency to put a hold on I-485 forms, which are required for green card processing. A block on green card applications means that refugees already in the United States can’t apply to bring their family members to reunite with them, Soerens pointed out. It also prevents them from gaining legal status while they’re here in the United States.

Shawn VanDiver, president and CEO of AfghanEvac, an organization advocating for America’s wartime allies from Afghanistan, said the order affects tens of thousands of people his nonprofit helps.

“These are the family of active duty U.S. service members. These are families who were separated. These are lawyers and prosecutors who put the Taliban away. These are women who served in our female tactical platoons,” VanDiver said. “The problem isn’t that [USCIS is] going to take another look at it. … The problem is that they’re re-interviewing. They’re stopping green card interviews from happening. They’re causing more limbo in these people’s lives. They’ve already been in limbo for four-and-a-half years.”

Daniel Salazar from Global Refuge explained that one of the things about USCIS’ memo that concerns him most is the lack of clarity about how the reviews will take place. “Who’s going to do the interviews? How adversarial will these meetings be? Will everyone be required to re-interview?” Salazar asked. “As cliché as it sounds, the devil will be in the details.”

Nayla Rush from the Center for Immigration Studies said that, even though the review didn’t sound like a bad idea to her, she still had questions about how the agency would conduct it.

Matthew Soerens at World Relief also questions the logistics and cost.

“Imagine if everyone in my city was told, ‘You have to go reapply for your driver’s license. We’re going to question if you actually are an authorized driver or not,’” Soerens said. “The stakes are even much greater here, because it’s not just, ‘Well, I need my driver’s license to drive to work and go about my life.’ This is people being asked to be reinterrogated to make sure that they can continue their lives lawfully in this country.”