Memo signals Trump review of 233k refugees

What happened

The Trump administration plans to reinterview and review the files of all roughly 233,000 refugees admitted into the U.S. under former President Joe Biden, several news organizations reported Monday night, citing a Nov. 21 memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joe Edlow. The memo also ordered an immediate halt to all green card approvals for those refugees and said they have “no right to appeal” if the review determined they were wrongfully admitted.

Who said what

The review, CNN said, marks another “unprecedented step in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown,” this time targeting people who fled war and persecution and underwent “rigorous vetting prior to entering the United States in what is generally a yearslong process.” The “comprehensive review” was “warranted,” Edlow wrote, because the Biden administration had prioritized “expediency” and “quantity” of refugees over “detailed screening and vetting.”

The policy shift is “likely to sow confusion and fear” among the affected refugees, and “likely to face legal challenges from advocates,” The Associated Press said. Trump halted all refugee resettlement before opening up a record-low 7,500 slots, most of them reserved for white Afrikaner South Africans. “To threaten refugees with taking away their status” is “unspeakably cruel and ”a vicious misuse of taxpayer money,” said Mark Hetfield, president of the refugee resettlement program HIAS, in a statement to CNN.

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What next?

The USCIS memo “indicated that there will be a list of people to reinterview within three months,” the AP said. “Besides the enormous cruelty of this undertaking,” said International Refugee Assistance Project president Sharif Aly, “it would also be a tremendous waste of government resources to review and reinterview 200,000 people who have been living peacefully in our communities for years.”