Trump's historic cut to refugee program poised to face legal challenges

Source: The Hill

11/09/25 12:00 PM ET


Refugee advocates are considering litigation after President Trump moved to cut refugee figures to their lowest level in history while favoring admissions for white South Africans. Trump last week set a cap that would allow the U.S. to admit no more than 7,500 refugees, a 94 percent cut from former President Biden’s goal of 125,000.

In doing so, the White House appeared to sidestep Congress, posting the notification on the Federal Register a month after it was signed without consulting with congressional Democrats. “The statute does not require the president to consult with the members of his own party who are in Congress. The statute requires the president to consult with specific committees in Congress, and that includes members of both parties,” Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president for U.S. legal programs with the International Refugee Assistance Project, said on a call with reporters.

“So that’s one set of legal problems. It’s also hugely problematic that this document sets up a race-based preference system instead of a humanitarian protection system, and so I expect to see a number of challenges to this.” The figure set by Trump would fall well below the lowest number of refugee admissions attained under his first administration — 11,814, then an all-time low reached at the height of the COVID pandemic.

Trump also directs that “the admissions numbers shall primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa.” Critics see the designation as an abandonment of the goals set by the 1980 program, which formalized existing U.S. policies on accepting those displaced because of persecution and danger. House Democrats said they were never consulted about the major decline in admissions or the shift in focus on who would be granted the protections.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/international/5595938-trump-cuts-refugee-admissions/