New Trump rule speeds process for revoking refugee status

The Trump administration on Tuesday published a rule speeding the process for terminating a refugee’s status, allowing the rare revocation to take place in as little as 10 days.

The final rule is set to take effect Wednesday and was published without going through the formal notice and comment period.

Currently, any refugee who is being stripped of their status has 30 days to appeal the decision, but Tuesday’s rule whittles that to 10.

“These families did everything asked of them. They submitted to interviews, background checks, and years of waiting abroad, only setting foot on U.S. soil once government officials approved their applications,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, refugee resettlement group, said in a statement. “Now DHS wants to revisit those decisions on a ten-day clock, a notice period wholly insufficient to find a lawyer, translate documents, or get records out of a country they were forced to flee due to conflict or persecution.”

“In some cases, refugees may not even receive the notice before their ten days are up, effectively eliminating their only chance to respond,” she added. “If the government’s case for termination is truly strong, it can afford to give people a meaningful chance to challenge it.”

The move comes after the Trump administration last November ordered a review of all refugees admitted to the U.S. under former President Biden.

The rule cites Biden’s refugee screening policy as the rationale for the change.

“The priority of expediency over quality encouraged a lack of robust interviews,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) writes in the rule.

“Certain questions to ensure that aliens were eligible for refugee status prior to admission to the United States were omitted and this increased the risk of ineligible aliens being approved for refugee classification and subsequently admitted to the United States,” DHS continued.

“The goal was to have as many refugees as practicable enter the United States to meet President Biden’s ceiling for refugee admissions and in order to accomplish this, a number of requirements for ensuring a thorough examination and assessment of eligibility were reduced or removed,” the officials added.

Upon taking office, President Trump also initially shuttered the refugee program, reopening admissions with the lowest-ever refugee camp in history and limiting the process largely to white South Africans.

“The release of this new policy marks a new low, in a parade of lows, in this administration’s ongoing effort to make permanent protection for refugees in this country a thing of the past,” Naomi Steinberg with HIAS, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, said in a press release.

“First, the administration shuttered refugee admissions. Now, they are trying to upend the core principle that refugee resettlement represents permanent protection,” Steinberg continued. “If this policy is allowed to go into effect, America can no longer claim to be the place of refuge and hope that it once was.”

“Stripping away the security promised to refugees, and with little to no procedural safeguards, shatters our promise to them and sends a devastating message to both refugees and their persecutors alike: that even the most lawful and carefully vetted path to protection in the United States can be arbitrarily revoked,” she added.

Refugees are among the most vetted immigrants to come to the U.S. Many spend years waiting in refugee camps before they can be admitted and undergo various rounds of interviews and screenings.

Their status can only be revoked if it is found that a refugee otherwise would not have qualified for the program.

Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, said the rule could be particularly detrimental to Afghans who came to the U.S. amid the withdrawal after in its aftermath. Some 30,000 Afghan refugees came to the U.S. between 2022 and 2025, he said.

“Ten days is not due process for the Afghans who stood with us. It is a deadline built to be missed,” VanDiver said in a statement.

“If the government believes a specific person lied, it already has the tools to prove it. The 30-day window has stood since 1980, through administrations of both parties. DHS concedes in its own rule that it cannot quantify a single benefit from shortening it,” he added. “The rule does not cite one Afghan case to justify the change. Yet Afghan allies will carry its weight.”