For this installation of Group Threat, I’m starting a series that I’m calling “The End of American Immigration.” This is my attempt to do a roundup of how exactly the Trump administration is going about its ethnic cleansing agenda.
This week I’m writing on how the administration is making people who are classified as refugees, or in the process of securing that classification into “illegal” immigrants.
To be classified as a refugee in the United States has always been extraordinarily difficult. The definition is extremely narrow leaving out people who flee endemic violence caused by centuries of economic exploitation (here I’m thinking Haiti) or those fleeing environmental degradation. The only people who qualify are those who fit this narrowly-applied definition:
“a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country because of “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution” due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin.”
Logistically, you can become a refugee through two channels. One is to make a journey into the United States and petition for asylum. For some this looks like overstaying a tourist visa. But for many, many others it looks like making a perilous journey across the United States Southern border – the deadliest land route in the world.
The second, very rare option, is called resettlement. This involves you being pre-vetted and selected for travel to the United States on the basis of a humanitarian claim, after enduring violence that displaces you from your home country. Often people have spent years, seventeen on average, of their lives in awful conditions waiting. During that time they do not have legal status.
These are, historically seen as the “worthiest” refugees, the ones who are juxtaposed to less-worthy so-called “economic migrants” – both distinctions that were always extremely problematic, and empirically questionable. Yet, even THAT is not stopping the Trump administration from sweeping measures that leave millions of people in the lurch.
First, the Trump admin is “Pretermitting” asylum claims.
“Pretermission” means that an asylum application is terminated prior to being heard. Prior to 2025, pretermission was very rare. But in April 2025, Sirce Owen, acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which is an agency within the Department of Justice tasked with conducting removal proceedings and adjudicating appeals from immigration courts, decided that in order for courts to be more “efficient” with the 4 million pending cases, they need to have quicker ways to “resolve cases on their dockets.”
Drawing on a series of (obscure) historical precedents, the office held that asylum claims could be terminated without a hearing if the facts presented by that asylum seeker as written would not qualify for asylum (a subjective assessment), or if there’s something with the filing itself that isn’t 100% correct, (also subjective). During the first Trump administration, one way immigration claims were denied was if you had any blank spaces on your form (e.g., you left a blank for your middle name because you don’t have one). Another was Requests For Evidence (RFEs) that slowed the process down, evidence that was often quite difficult for someone who fled home in a hurry, or who was emerging from a situation of human trafficking (I did research on this at the time with Julie Dahlstrom).
But perhaps even more damaging is that asylum claims will also be pretermitted if – as a later EOIR directive determined – that asylum seeker can be sent to a third country with which the United States has an “asylum cooperative agreement.” Deportees only recourse in these decisions comes from proving they won't be tortured in the third country, a nearly impossible task. People have been sent to South Sudan and Cameroon – countries that generate asylees themselves due to war. The Trump administration has also ordered people pretermitted to Uganda – a country well-known for its human rights abuses – though no one has been sent there yet as the decision has been caught up in courts.
Two women I’ve interviewed – a woman who was enslaved in her native country, another who saw her father killed, and her sister raped in an attack that she fled – received decisions to be pretermitted to Uganda, a country that they have never been to, thousands of miles away from anything they’ve known.
Getting there would mean additional trauma: court hearings (already happening), indefinite detentions, and eventually a deportation flight. In the past, these would be slam dunk asylum cases, but today, their fully legal claims are being diverted, making them, per ICE’s 100% mandate, removable.
Second, they are attempting to deny people work authorization as they wait for their asylum claims.
Refusing people's work permits would deny them the possibility of working legally while they wait for their asylum claims to be adjudicated, again illegalizing them, even though they are part of a completely legal process.
The federal government has said that they would specifically no longer issue work permits for people until processing times for asylum can get 180 days or lower, a process that they estimate will take somewhere between 14 and 173 years (so much for immigrating the right way).
The already Kafkaesque pathways to asylum are also manufactured. Even before Trump took office a second time, for the past two decades, a third of what is spent on immigrant detention is spent on adjudication of immigration claims, a ratio that is becoming ever-more lopsided as the deportation apparatus is dramatically expanded.
Third, they are denying Green Cards to Resettled Refugees
The Trump administration recently issued a memo that would require all resettled refugees to be reassessed for their claims before they can obtain a Green Card. This is a dramatic departure from how resettlement has worked for over four decades in the United States, since the establishment of the 1980 Refugee Act. Standing law holds that resettled people have a right to apply for a green card within a year of their arrival.
This pathway to residency that resettled refugees are afforded, is rare in United States law, but it owes to the precarity of those resettled, and the humanitarian nature of the program. As I write in my book Refuge, people who are resettled have typically fled persecution in their country of origin on the basis of their identity – like racial group, religion, or sexuality – or due to war.
They are people who have endured terrible trauma – many spending years in prison, and losing loved ones in war – who had to live displaced in countries near their own from which they could apply for this program. In those countries, their kids often lacked access to quality education, and they had limited access to healthcare and limited employment opportunities.
People selected for resettlement more often than not have a dire humanitarian need – e.g., kids with chronic health burdens. Among the families in Refuge, one of the children had Spina Bifida, and another was in need of a cochlear implant.
Resettled refugees endure years of vetting, through 4-5 rounds of interviews. Resettlement is so difficult that it makes these people the “most vetted” category of immigrants entering the United States, period.
Given that the administration has terminated the resettlement program, except for White Afrikaners, and given their refusal to hear bona fide asylum claims (see above), this new Trump policy is one that would make over 200,000 people – completely legal, who were invited to travel here – detainable, and ultimately, deportable.
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ICE’s mandate has long been 100% removal of anyone who lacks the appropriate documentation to prove that they have a right to stay in the United States. Defenders of ICE’s function on both sides of the aisle like to repeat the refrain that people should just “not come” if they can’t come legally or that they should simply “apply for citizenship” if they’re here.
Ignoring for a second this is not an option for most folks due to the decades of shrinking legal pathways, this dichotomous framing belies the fact that legality and illegality are manmade.
Sociologist Emile Durkheim, argued that societies draw a line between what is “normal” and what is “deviant” or “legal” and “illegal.” And Critical Race theorists like Derek Bell, building on Karl Marx, add that where that line of legality is drawn, and what falls on either side of that line, is determined not by any inherent morality, but by power which in America is often synonymous with White interest.
In other words, what is “legal” and “illegal” tells us more about the morality of the policy-maker than the people who fall under either designation.
Legal channels for migration have been narrowing for decades, pushing more and more immigrants into what Cecilia Menjivar calls “legal liminality” (the grey zone between holding status & not holding status). Once pushed into legal liminality, immigrants are then channeled into an expanding removal apparatus and, in the case of policies like Clinton’s IIRAIRA, or Trump’s Laken Riley, into an expanding criminal-legal apparatus.
What the Trump administration is doing today isn’t exactly a complete departure from the past; it is a turbocharging of these tools to end refuge, and immigration, in the country, all the while feeding the nation’s insatiable for-profit deportations.