{"id":980,"date":"2026-07-09T10:08:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T10:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernhomejournals.com\/?p=980"},"modified":"2026-07-09T10:08:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T10:08:05","slug":"trump-is-deploying-every-u-s-refugee-officer-to-just-one-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernhomejournals.com\/?p=980","title":{"rendered":"Trump Is Deploying Every U.S. Refugee Officer to Just One Country"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the fall of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security had employees in dozens of countries, from Peru to Turkey, to vet the most vulnerable and persecuted individuals in the world for potential entry into the United States.<\/p>\n

Read more Graham Platner\u2019s Collapse Is a \u2018Reckoning\u2019 for Political Vetting<\/a><\/p>\n

Just one year later, those screeners were working in just one country: South Africa, where the Trump administration has singularly focused U.S. refugee resettlement efforts on the country\u2019s white population.<\/p>\n

As of June, all but three of the 7,730 refugees admitted into the U.S. in fiscal 2026 were from South Africa, according to newly released State Department , an exponential increase from the one South African admitted in the fiscal year before Trump took office.<\/p>\n

The situation is \u201cunprecedented,\u201d said Brandon Prelogar, who led the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services\u2019 International and Refugee Affairs Division in the opening months of the Trump administration and has worked in several government roles in the refugee space since 2004. \u201cIt\u2019s the only place the refugee corps has been deployed to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually you circle to other places, but here they\u2019re just having people come in and out\u201d of South Africa, said another former senior USCIS official briefed on current procedures.<\/p>\n

USCIS did not respond to NOTUS\u2019 request for comment.<\/p>\n

When President Donald Trump moved back into the White House last year, he quickly paused refugee admissions. USCIS subsequently began repatriating all of its refugee corps that had been deployed abroad.<\/p>\n

Soon after, Trump made an exception for Afrikaners in South Africa, tasking the government to prioritize the ethnic minority group that governed the country during apartheid as \u201cvictims of unjust racial discrimination.\u201d In the year plus since, he\u2019s reshaped the entire system to this end.<\/p>\n

Claims of white genocide in the country have been discredited<\/u><\/span>. But Trump and Elon Musk, who is South African and previously led DOGE for the Trump administration, have long made the alleged persecution of Afrikaners a talking point. Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly clashed over the subject during a dramatic Oval Office meeting last year.<\/p>\n

Within USCIS, many of the initial changes implementing the refocus on Afrikaners happened behind closed doors, from the top down. All-hands meetings were canceled soon after the start of the second Trump administration, so it was more difficult to find out about the work of the agency, said Jason Marks, who worked on both refugee and asylum issues at the agency for over a decade before taking the administration\u2019s deferred resignation offer last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou started to hear, \u2018So-and-so\u2019s going to South Africa,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt was almost like, are we being trolled here? Is this like a trolling exercise?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jen Smyers, a former deputy director of the Health and Human Services refugee office who left when Trump took office, also initially questioned the veracity of Trump\u2019s order.<\/p>\n

\u201cI read it and thought it was an Onion article, and then, no, it was very real,\u201d Smyers said.<\/p>\n

Concentrating resources on one group of people is \u201cjust unheard of,\u201d Marks said. \u201cTo basically repurpose the entire refugee program and concentrate all of its resources on one location for one politically and racially favored group and then exclude everyone else is, frankly, heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

A former senior USCIS official said the Trump administration has changed the definition of a refugee to accommodate Afrikaners.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe standard for what is considered a refugee has been changed, has been sort of lowered so they can meet this population\u2019s concerns,\u201d the former official said. \u201cOur law has a different bar that wouldn\u2019t normally meet their definition for persecution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Rep. Garc\u00eda Faces New Meddling Accusations Ahead of Midterms<\/a><\/p>\n

Typically, refugee processing is a years-long process involving multiple entities, including the United Nations refugee agency, although that organization said<\/u><\/span> it wasn\u2019t involved in the vetting of the first group of Afrikaners that arrived in the U.S. last spring.<\/p>\n

The speed at which people from South Africa were brought to the U.S. is \u201cremarkable\u201d compared to the typical process, Marks said. The former senior USCIS official said the administration was \u201cexpending a massive amount of resources\u201d on each refugee, calling the per-capita allocation unprecedented.<\/p>\n

The United States admitted more than 100,000 refugees in 2024. A year-and-a-half later, fewer than 18,000 are being admitted annually. Trump\u2019s administration has slashed capacity of the web of agencies that undertake the typically years-long process of identifying, screening and admitting refugees into the country.<\/p>\n

The State Department\u2019s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration was so gutted by mass layoffs that the Health and Human Services Department\u2019s Office of Refugee Resettlement, an entirely domestic agency, took over its international operations. The Administration for Children and Families, the HHS arm that houses the refugee office, itself shed 31% of its staff under Trump.<\/p>\n

USCIS, responsible for the primary vetting and interviewing of refugee candidates, has shed half of its refugee corps since Trump took office.<\/p>\n

The agency also began pushing its refugee corps to accept deployments to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to work on administrative matters largely involving immigrant records. Despite their misgivings, one-fourth of refugee officers accepted the temporary assignments due to pressure they felt from management. Last year, for the first time, the agency also began hiring officers with law enforcement duties including making arrests, carrying firearms and executing warrants.<\/p>\n

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow last year tasked staff with reviewing the cases of all refugees admitted into the United States under former President Joe Biden. Michael Knowles, a USCIS asylum officer of 34 years who retired in October but still represents asylum and refugee staff as part of the American Federation of Government Employees, said that work has been highly labor-intensive and has only validated the prior administration\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

For USCIS workers, their jobs have now manifested their biggest fears.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy staff was petrified about what the Trump administration would do to them,\u201d Prelogar said. \u201cTheir most widely imagined concerns ended up being verified as legitimate ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prelogar said refugee officers sign up for their work to help \u201csome of the worst off people on planet Earth,\u201d while also protecting against national security threats.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be redirected to a population that doesn\u2019t pass the laugh test as far as being one who we would normally be admitting into the U.S., I think it has been wildly disheartening for staff to pivot to that sort of population,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The president has significant latitude over the U.S. refugee system in responding to changing global dynamics, and they\u2019re charged by law with setting the target number of refugees to be admitted each year. But multiple sources told NOTUS any efforts to rebuild the decimated infrastructure of the system in the future could be arduous.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say the president resigned today, and all of a sudden the vice president decided he wanted a strong refugee program \u2014 it would take a long time to rebuild that infrastructure,\u201d a second former USCIS official told NOTUS.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the system is only working for South Africans. Earlier this year, Trump increased the refugee cap for 2026 by 10,000 \u2014 with all additional slots reserved for Afrikaners.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people were vetted, approved and are now just shut out,\u201d said Marks, who had previously been working on the Biden-era initiative to resettle vulnerable Afghans following the exit of the U.S. from Afghanistan. The Trump administration has since discontinued that program.<\/p>\n

Read more Senate Republicans Are Dug In Against Nuking Filibuster Despite Trump<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s devastating,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside Trump’s program to bring Afrikaners to the U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-immigration"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump Is Deploying Every U.S. Refugee Officer to Just One Country - Modern Home Journals<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/modernhomejournals.com\/?p=980\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump Is Deploying Every U.S. Refugee Officer to Just One Country - Modern Home Journals\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Inside Trump's program to bring Afrikaners to the U.S.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/modernhomejournals.com\/?p=980\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Modern Home Journals\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-09T10:08:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/533de239efc09a2ab59959cc1bff86d0\"},\"headline\":\"Trump Is Deploying Every U.S. Refugee Officer to Just One Country\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-09T10:08:05+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980\"},\"wordCount\":1273,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/9b9566713dba542880a50d7ebc5a3caa-scaled.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Immigration\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980\",\"name\":\"Trump Is Deploying Every U.S. Refugee Officer to Just One Country - Modern Home Journals\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/9b9566713dba542880a50d7ebc5a3caa-scaled.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-09T10:08:05+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/533de239efc09a2ab59959cc1bff86d0\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/?p=980#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/9b9566713dba542880a50d7ebc5a3caa-scaled.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/modernhomejournals.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/9b9566713dba542880a50d7ebc5a3caa-scaled.jpg\",\"width\":2560,\"height\":1707,\"caption\":\"Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, Monday, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. 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