Refugee advocates across the U.S. this week prepared for the Trump administration’s Presidential Determination on the refugee admission cap for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1.
The Refugee Act of 1980 sets Sept. 30 as the deadline by which the President must establish his refugee policy for the year. However, during his last term in 2019, Trump delayed releasing the Presidential Determination, which temporarily froze resettlement for the month of October. With the government shutdown imminent, Trump failed to deliver for a second time. As of the time of writing, no new refugees are arriving, and all flights scheduled for the beginning of the month have been canceled.
While Biden set the refugee admission cap at 125,000, Trump indefinitely suspended both admission and resettlement in his first days in office. This included some 100,000 refugees who had already been approved for entry, leaving many stranded in camps, a move that has been condemned by advocates domestically and internationally.
In a recent speech to the United Nations, the administration made several bold claims and called for reform of the refugee system. Representatives argued that the country has no obligation to admit asylees or refugees, and that granting protected status should never be permanent.
Those refugees accepted before Jan. 20 who come from countries on Trump’s travel ban list have been prevented from entering the country as well.
In a change considered controversial by refugee service providers and international political figures, Trump launched a program earlier this year to resettle Afrikaners and other racial minorities from South Africa. The President froze resettlement of refugees fleeing war and persecution, thousands of whom already had travel arrangements to the U.S., electing to welcome new applicants from South Africa instead of admitting refugees of other nationalities who had already been accepted.
Trump claims that white South Africans are the victim of a genocide, referring largely to a series of murders affecting all racial groups and the government’s attempts to redistribute land to its historically underprivileged Black community. Importantly, BBC reports that there is no political party in South Africa that believes there is a genocide, and that white South Africans continue to enjoy higher living standards and better job prospects than their Black counterparts.
Since the program’s announcement in February to early August, fewer than 100 Afrikaners had come to the United States.
This shift toward Afrikaner resettlement comes in the wake of a district court ruling that mandated the government resettle the 12,000 refugees approved with travel arrangements before Trump’s inauguration.
If the President continues with his plans of resettling Afrikaners primarily, it could mean the lowest number of refugees admitted in resettlement program history. The lowest cap in 45 years came in the last year of Trump’s first term, when the country set the limit at 15,000 refugees.