Refugee and civil rights groups condemned a new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services memo clearing the way for the arrest of thousands of refugees lawfully resettled during the Biden administration.
The directive enables Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to detain and re-screen refugees who did not obtain permanent residency within their first year in the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security has the discretion to release those individuals as lawful permanent residents or place them in removal proceedings.
Beth Oppenheim
“I have never seen anything like this in my 25 years of refugee protection work,” said Beth Oppenheim, CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS. “This memo was done in secret, with zero coordination with the organizations that serve refugees. It is a betrayal of our values and our legal commitments, and it will cause extraordinary harm.”
The Feb. 18 memorandum, which is certain to face swift legal challenges, comes amid the Trump administration’s widening and increasingly violent anti-immigration campaign that has resulted in the detention of a record-setting 73,000 people as of mid-January, the American Immigration Council reported.
President Donald Trump’s policies overall have generated more than 20,000 federal lawsuits and 4,400 rulings against the administration, with yet more cases pending. Many are immigration related.
U.H.A. v. Bondi was filed by rights groups last month to stop Operation PARRIS, an anacronym for Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening. The DHS program led to the rounding up of lawfully resettled refugees in Minnesota still awaiting Green Cards.
The operation sparked widespread protests and led to federal agents killing two Americans in Minneapolis.
The class action lawsuit accuses DHS of putting more than 100 refugees through “a terrifying ordeal” beginning with warrantless arrests and detentions before being flown to holding centers in Texas.
“It is a betrayal of our values and our legal commitments, and it will cause extraordinary harm.”
“In these crowded facilities, refugees have limited or no contact with family members or counsel, and many have been subject to custodial interrogations about sensitive details concerning refugee applications they submitted years ago, typically without access to their own documents or opportunity to contact an attorney,” the suit states. “At no point are these refugees told the reasons for their arrest or the purpose of the interrogations.”
And those who are released are typically deposited in public spaces in Texas “with no means of returning home to Minnesota, in many cases without identification, phones or money. Others remain imprisoned without any ongoing proceedings or stated reasons for their ongoing detention.”
A federal court issued a restraining order in the case Jan. 28, temporarily halting ICE from arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota.
But the USCIS memo indicates the federal government now will use similar tactics against refugees lawfully resettled nationwide: “If the refugee does not voluntarily return, DHS will return the individual to custody (i.e. arrest and detain) for this purpose. DHS may maintain custody for the duration of the inspection and examination process.”
The agency likely will employ another policy change to enable the process, namely allowing ICE agents to use administrative rather than judicial warrants to forcibly enter residences.
The Trump administration claims the changes are necessary to more rigorously uphold rules governing refugee resettlement and to protect “national security, public safety and fraud-related issues.”
However, others see it as a way to perplex and frighten the 200,000 refugees resettled during President Biden’s term in office, even those who have achieved permanent residency.
Laurie Bell Cooper
“I am concerned that the Feb. 18 memo and the indiscriminate detention of refugees in Minnesota are the opening salvos in an attack on refugees resettled all over the United States.” said Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president for U.S. legal programs with the International Refugee Assistance Project.
Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, questioned why the administration would expend so much energy, money and time reassessing refugees who already have passed rigorous screening to get into the U.S.
“This directive diverts personnel and resources to reassess one of the most vetted groups of people in the country,” she said. “Our government is traumatizing individuals who complied with every requirement to enter lawfully and who have already demonstrated a credible and well-founded fear of persecution in the countries they fled.”
Jennie Murray
Targeting people already cleared is not the answer to fixing an immigration system that is already backlogged and overloaded, Murray added.
“Refugee resettlement has long been an essential instrument that enhances our national security, strengthens our economy and upholds human dignity. Major changes to the resettlement program under the current administration have slowed refugee admissions to a trickle and are keeping the most vulnerable from accessing protection.”
The memo and other immigration policy changes represent a failure in how the country honors its commitments and how it treats the most vulnerable, World Relief President Myal Greene said.
“Forcing refugees, who have already been stringently interrogated, to undergo further questioning was already an affront, but irrevocably breaking their trust by withdrawing the safety promised to them and placing them in physical custody displays a very low value of human life. To the great shame of our nation, we have made image bearers of God … into pawns of petty political ends.”