Refugee advocates say thousands of vetted cases remain stranded abroad
The Trump administration has capped US refugee admissions for fiscal year 2027 at 17,500, with the State Department saying those admitted will be “primarily” white South African Afrikaners — an Afrikaans-speaking white ethnic group descended from Dutch and French colonial settlers to South Africa. The ceiling matches the 17,500 limit that applied to fiscal year 2026, which ended September 30; during that year the United States admitted 16,292 refugees total — nearly all of them Afrikaners, except for five from Afghanistan. Under President Joe Biden, the annual cap had been 125,000.
The September 25 determination continues a pattern of executive actions across Trump’s two terms that have halted nearly all refugee admissions except for white South Africans. A February 2025 executive order, E.O. 14204, declared Afrikaners victims of “unjust racial discrimination.” Trump and his allies have repeatedly alleged a “white genocide” against South Africa’s white minority population, a claim the South African government has rejected. The Guardian, in its reporting, found no proof of a “white genocide” in South Africa, and South Africa’s new ambassador to the United States — himself an Afrikaner — has also said the phenomenon does not exist. Groups in the US working with refugees view the administration’s moves as discriminatory.
“President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed, and driven off their property across South Africa,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. “While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart,” Kelly added.
A State Department spokesperson defended the policy in similar terms: “President Trump has been very clear that we are prioritizing the resettlement of Afrikaners in South Africa who are escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, a US policy indicated in E.O. 14204.” The Department of Homeland Security, asked about the cap, referred questions to the State Department.
Refugee resettlement organizations described the approach as a departure from a system built on humanitarian need. “What is lost is the focus on humanitarian need,” said Kennji Kizuka, director of policy for the International Rescue Committee, a New York-headquartered humanitarian organization that works with refugees worldwide. “We built up over decades this humanitarian system that was meant to try to avoid politicized decisions around which kind of refugees to admit.” Kizuka said the disruption has left some refugees stranded after years of vetting. Some who had been approved for travel before Trump returned to office “had travel plans that were canceled at the last minute,” he said. “They were ready to go and then everything was pulled out from underneath them.”
The International Refugee Assistance Project, a New York-based legal non-profit, has been challenging the policy in court. Mevlüde Akay Alp, IRAP’s senior litigation attorney, said the changes have had a sweeping effect on people already in the pipeline. “Hundreds of thousands of refugees who are in the US refugee admissions program pipeline are impacted,” she said. “It’s particularly cruel to see the way in which the government has prioritized new white Afrikaners to the program without even considering these people who had gone through years of processing and had been promised safety here in the United States.” The refugee admission process can be excruciatingly long, with refugees required to undergo vetting, interviews and background checks — processes that can take years. Thousands of refugees were already in queue to be admitted to the US when Trump halted the bulk of refugee arrivals but started rushing Afrikaners through.
The State Department has said it will accept refugees on case-by-case exceptions, with Afrikaners the principal group processed under that framework. A lawsuit filed by IRAP last year, representing a number of refugees and refugee resettlement organizations, accuses the government of refusing to disclose how refugees can qualify. “Nobody else, including any of our plaintiffs, have any way of requesting an exception for themselves, no matter how dire their situation or how strong their connections to the United States are,” Alp said. An appeals court largely sided with the Trump administration, but IRAP challenged that decision and the case was sent back to a Washington state federal court; the legal battle continues.
Court filings and interviews describe the experiences of several families whose cases have stalled.
Vartush and her family, who are being represented by IRC, are among those currently in this limbo. Vartush, who requested that only her first name be used due to fear of jeopardizing her son’s refugee admission process, is a 70-year-old US citizen living in California. She is an ethnic Armenian Christian who was living in Iran with her family and came to the United States in 2009 under the refugee admissions program due to religious persecution, but delays and the lengthy refugee admission process kept her adult son in Iran. Finally, in 2024, Vartush’s son and his fiancée were approved to take the next step in the refugee admission process. His fiancée went first and arrived in the US at the end of 2024. His trip was supposed to be next; he sold his belongings and prepared to leave, with IRC attorneys requesting to expedite his case, citing his clinical depression. But then Trump came back into office and radically changed policy, halting the possibility for Vartush’s son to arrive in the US and be reunited with the rest of his family. “He suffers from depression,” Vartush said through an interpreter. “But obviously that got even worse.” The current US war in Iran has only deepened the family’s stress and the son’s mental health. Vartush calls him daily to wake him up, she said. “The war itself brought a lot of anxiety,” Vartush said. “We have fear and anxiety, especially with his depression, I’m very worried that one day he might do something to himself.”
Other people stuck in this limbo include some who are involved in the IRAP lawsuit against the administration. Their names have all been changed as part of the lawsuit, due to fear of jeopardizing their pending refugee case and, in some cases, for fear of violent retaliation by groups persecuting them.
Sara, 60, and her 19-year-old disabled son are stuck in Jordan, where they have been living since fleeing Iraq. According to her court declaration, she and her older son — now a US citizen who has been in Idaho since 2012 after arriving in the country as a refugee — lived in Basra during the US war in Iraq, where her husband was killed when his car was bombed as fighting intensified. Her brother-in-law, a member of an influential militia network, then demanded that she give him her house and custody of her son and fired a gun at her house, the court declaration says, and eventually Sara and the son fled to Jordan. In Jordan she gave birth to her younger son, who suffers from a birth defect in his brain. Sara said they have lived in Jordan for years, applied for refugee status back in 2014, and face discrimination and extortion in Jordan as Iraqi refugees. By January 2025, she had sold belongings, begun an American cultural orientation course, and purchased baby clothes for her older son’s first child. “I wanted to make sure to be ready for the day that I received the call from the US government that we would travel to the United States,” Sara said in her declaration. “I know that there are many other refugees prevented from traveling who are suffering through things that are even more difficult than my situation,” she added.
Miriam, who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo with her family in the mid-2000s after being persecuted by paramilitary groups, has been separated from her youngest son for years. According to an IRAP court filing, the family spent nearly 15 years in a refugee camp in neighboring Burundi while undergoing the lengthy process of vetting, background checks and interviews. During that time, Miriam gave birth to her youngest son. According to the filing, Miriam was “erroneously” advised by staff at the UN that adding the baby to their family’s refugee application at that point would delay the process. In 2021, when the family received tickets to fly and settle in the US, her youngest son — who was five years old by then — was prevented from boarding because his name was not listed on the flight manifest. He has remained without any relatives in the Burundi refugee camp. “Miriam speaks to her son every day, often multiple times, so that he knows that she is thinking of him and feels emotionally supported,” the filing reads. “But the separation has caused Miriam and her son unbearable frustration and emotional pain.” The filing adds: “Miriam believes the US government is purposely neglecting her and her family because they do not want her to be here and do not value her family in the same way that they value white Afrikaners, just because of her race.”
Marcos, a 59-year-old Salvadoran man who has lived in the United States for more than 25 years and currently lives in California, has spent a decade trying to bring his stepdaughter to the US through a refugee program for Central American minors. According to his court declaration, his wife had to flee El Salvador and leave her daughter behind because of domestic violence at the hands of her daughter’s biological father; the daughter was later threatened by gangs seeking extortion payments. After years of stalled processing, Marcos restarted the process in 2022 and was told in early 2025 that his stepdaughter would arrive in February. “I started preparing her room in our home. I painted her room a dark pink color,” he wrote in his declaration. “My wife also bought our daughter new clothes to wear. We also bought her a new computer so that she could be prepared for her studies here in the United States.” But Trump suspended all refugee arrivals just before his stepdaughter’s arrival. Marcos, his wife and his stepdaughter remain in limbo, worried about her wellbeing and wondering whether she will ever be able to come to be with her mother.