The Department of Homeland Security issued a memo Wednesday stating that federal immigration agents should arrest refugees who have not yet obtained a green card and detain them indefinitely for rescreening — a policy shift that upends decades of protections and puts tens of thousands of people who entered during the Biden administration at risk.
The new policy rescinds a 2010 memo that said failing to apply for status as a lawful permanent resident within a year of living in the United States is not a basis for detaining refugees who entered the country legally. Two Trump administration officials wrote in the new directive that the previous guidance was incomplete and that the law requires DHS to detain and subject those refugees to a new set of interviews while in detention.
The memo appeared in a court filing one day before a scheduled hearing in Minnesota federal court, where a judge temporarily blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late January from detaining 5,600 refugees in the state after several organizations sued. Immigration officers arrested dozens of resettled people from countries including Somalia, Ecuador and Venezuela for further questioning as part of an enforcement surge dubbed Operation PARRIS that the Trump administration has said was aimed at combating fraud. Immigration lawyers say many were quickly transported to Texas detention centers and later released without their identity documents.
The International Refugee Assistance Project, one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, is asking a judge to declare the new refugee detention policy unlawful to prevent more refugees in Minnesota from being arrested.
“I am concerned that the Feb. 18 memo and the indiscriminate detention of refugees in Minnesota are the opening salvos in an attack on refugees resettled all over the United States,” said Laurie Ball Cooper, the organization’s vice president for U.S. legal programs.
Refugee resettlement groups across the country see the Minnesota operation as a precursor to an expected shift in refugee policy that could undermine the nation’s half-century-old promise to offer safe harbor to the world’s most persecuted.
“This memo, drafted in secret and without coordination with agencies working directly with refugees, represents an unprecedented and unnecessary breach of trust,” said Beth Oppenheim, chief executive of HIAS, one of the oldest refugee agencies in the country and the world. “We have both a moral and a legal obligation to demand that DHS immediately rescind this action.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment on the memo and concerns from refugee resettlement organizations.
President Donald Trump suspended all refugee admissions on his first day in office, including those involving people who had already been approved to come to the U.S. His administration later reopened the program to White South Africans, who he said face race-based persecution in their home country, though they had rarely qualified before for refugee status in the U.S. or any other country.
More than 200,000 refugees entered the U.S. during the Biden administration and most had waited years to be admitted, according to federal data. Some of those new arrivals have already received green cards, but advocates estimate about 100,000 refugees have not and could be subject to detention under the new policy. Most entered assuming they were protected the moment they stepped on U.S. soil, according to refugee experts and attorneys. Refugees are permitted to apply to become permanent residents after one year of physical presence in the country after their arrival date.
But the Trump administration is recasting refugee status as conditional instead of permanent — a major change in how they have historically been regarded. The memo said refugees who haven’t adjusted their status must endure a second round of “congressionally mandated” vetting to screen for public safety, fraud and national security risks.
“This requires DHS to take the affirmative actions of locating, arresting, and taking the alien into custody,” states the memo, signed by acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow.
DHS based its policy on a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that says refugees who don’t apply for a green card after a year must return to DHS “custody.” It voids previous guidance indicating that a failure to adjust was not a “proper basis” for removal or detention and if any unadjusted refugee was arrested, they must be released within 48 hours.
There are many reasons, advocates said, for why a refugee might not apply at the one-year mark, including confusion about the process, language barriers, lost mail from changing addresses and difficulty navigating the system.
But returning to DHS “custody” has never meant arrest and unlimited detention, attorneys said in court filings. The historical practice for USCIS was to issue notices for appointments or letters urging compliance, according to court documents in the pending lawsuit.
Ball Cooper said Congress does not demand revetting as part of the adjustment of status. The law requires the federal government to “inspect” or ask specific questions after the one-year mark, such as whether the person has been physically present in the U.S. throughout that time or whether they have already obtained lawful status through a different channel.
“None of that requires interrogating a refugee about their original claim, which they’ve already proven to the U.S. government,” Ball Cooper said.
The Trump administration also halted green-card processing months ago for scores of countries from which refugees originate, making it impossible to satisfy the requirement.
What has traditionally been treated as a paperwork issue is now a detention issue under the new guidance. Advocates call that a major escalation in the Trump administration’s targeting of legal immigrants. Changing how the law is enforced for refugees who had begun rebuilding their lives under a different set of assumptions is unfair and disproportionately punitive, said Shawn VanDiver, a U.S. Navy veteran who founded the nonprofit organization AfghanEvac.
“It seems like they are just trying to find new and different ways to put grandma in jail,” said VanDiver. “You don’t invite people into the United States under one set of rules and start moving the goalposts after they arrive.”
Kennji Kizuka, policy director for the International Rescue Committee, said refugees are being punished not because of something they did, but because they had the bad luck of arriving when President Joe Biden was in office. Refugees undergo intense screening from various federal agencies and security checks before arriving.
ICE arrested about 100 refugees, some of whom were children, before Minnesota District Judge John Tunheim issued a temporary restraining order in response to the International Refugee Assistance Project’s lawsuit. Dozens were flown to Texas to be asked the same questions they faced during screening overseas, according to attorneys who were present during the interviews. Several of those cases involved refugees with pending green-card applications. There are no confirmed reports of DHS terminating an individual’s refugee status as a result of the operation.
“As far as I’m aware, there’s never been this kind of blanket sweeping revetting of refugees,” Kizuka said. “There’s a process to check for individual fraud and have investigations. But this is a fishing expedition.”
The DHS memo cited statistics from an unpublished review from USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate that found insufficient vetting and some public safety concerns in regard to 31,000 recently admitted refugees from the Western Hemisphere. However, it’s unclear where the data came from or what conclusions the internal report reached about “known failures” in screening people from other parts of the world.
Vetting refugees from specific parts of the world, such as conflict zones, can be challenging, experts said. But the layers of screening, hours of interviews and the fact that would-be refugees can be denied at every step in the process — including the moment they arrive at a U.S. airport — have created a high bar of scrutiny for anyone seeking refugee status. Refugees convicted of aggravated felonies can lose their status and be deported, but studies have repeatedly found — as they have with all immigrants — that refugees commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born citizens.
Meredith L.B. Owen, senior director of policy and advocacy at Refugee Council USA, said the memo directly threatens the very purpose of why the U.S. brings in refugees. Advocates expect a coming ruling from the Board of Immigration Appeals to set up the legal mechanism for the Trump administration’s broader push to deport thousands of recently admitted refugees. That could ultimately lead to refugees being sent back to the places from which they were fleeing war or political persecution, thus putting their lives in danger.
That scenario, known as refoulement, violates international law, said Owen, whose group represents all of the national resettlement agencies that provide assistance to refugees upon their arrival to the U.S.
“This administration stops at nothing to terrorize day after day after day refugee communities in Minnesota and to make sure refugee communities across the country are fearful and bracing themselves for what’s to come,” she said.
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