A total of 78 national, state, and local organizations representing refugee resettlement agencies, direct service providers, faith-based groups, and human rights advocates on Sept. 16 released a joint letter to Congress calling for urgent action to restore the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) and protect the most at-risk and vulnerable refugees around the globe.

The letter comes in response to troubling signals from the administration ahead of the Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) Presidential Determination (PD) on refugee admissions, amidst reports of discriminatory resettlement selection practices and significant cuts to refugee admissions with compelling protection needs, such as refugees already referred for U.S. resettlement, a news release related to the letter noted.

The letter urges Congress to exercise its appropriations and oversight authority and to pressure the administration to:

• Fulfill its legal obligations under the Refugee Act by conducting meaningful consultations with Congress and setting the FY 2026 refugee admissions goal by October 1;
• Set a refugee admissions goal of 125,000 for FY 2026, reflecting both the global scale of need and the more than 120,000 refugees conditionally approved for resettlement;
• Prioritize the most vulnerable, at-risk, and long-waiting refugees, regardless of nationality, race, or religion;
• Defend and expand federal investments in refugee processing, admissions, and resettlement infrastructure by restoring full access to basic healthcare, nutrition assistance, and social services for arriving refugees;

Yvette Cooper, the U.K. home secretary, “has been strongly criticised by refugee charities after announcing that she is suspending refugee family reunion applications – the system allowing people granted asylum to bring relatives to the UK – until new, tighter rules come into force next year,” reports the Guardian.

Cooper said the move “would mean refugees face the same restrictions as other migrants hoping to bring family to join them in the UK,” the BBC reported on its website. “This generally means someone must earn at least £29,000 a year and provide suitable accommodation, while their family member may need to demonstrate a basic level of English.”

Reuters recently published an article that weaves in the journey of a small rubber boat carrying 57 people who are trying to reach Europe from Libya into a broader narrative that highlights the continued dangers facing migrants who attempt to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.

“The rubber dinghy was one of more than 1,300 migrant boats that ran into trouble while trying to reach Europe by sea last year, according to figures provided by Alarm Phone,” writes Joan Faus, Mariano Zafra and Sudev Kiyada in their article.

The article highlights the Faustian bargain that European countries such as Italu have made with countries such as Libya, effectively handing off responsibility for reducing migration from Africa to countries that have documented cases of abuse of migrants.

The European Union’s economy “would have looked far weaker after the pandemic without foreign workers, European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde said Saturday, warning policymakers not to ignore migration’s role even as it fuels political tensions,” reports Bartosz Brzezinski in Politico.

The ECB president “argued that migration has played a crucial role in offsetting Europe’s shrinking birth rate and growing appetite for shorter working hours,” the Politico story said.

“Migration could, in principle, play a crucial role in easing” labor shortages as native populations age, Lagarde said. But “political economy pressures may increasingly limit inflows,” she said, according to a report in Fortune.

“At a time when many Western democracies are trying to keep immigrants out, Spain is boldly welcoming them in,” writes By Omar G. Encarnación, in a recent New York Times Op-Ed.

While the country’s low birthrate is one factor in its welcoming embrace of migrants that only tells part of the story, he notes. Spain’s “rich and complex history helps explain the relatively high level of tolerance for immigration among Spaniards.”

“Ultimately, however, Spain’s immigration politics owe most to the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, one of the last exponents of social democracy in Europe. Although decidedly liberal, Mr. Sánchez’s approach is far from an experiment with open borders. Instead, it’s as pragmatic as it is deliberate. It’s true he has built-in advantages not shared by other European leaders. But by marrying practical solutions to an uplifting message, he has provided a case study in how to build support for progressive immigration policies,” writes Encarnacion.

 Spain “is proving an important point: A generous immigration policy is not a threat to the nation or to a thriving economy. More than that, it is a resource for growth and renewal that Spain’s peers spurn at their cost,” he notes.

A judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to admit approximately 12,000 refugees into the U.S. under a court order partially blocking the president’s efforts to suspend the nation’s refugee admissions program, the Associated Press reported on May 5.

The order is available here.

Italian judges on Friday “again denied the government’s request to hold asylum seekers in Albania while their cases are being processed, dealing another major setback to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s anti-immigration policy,” the New York Times reported on Jan. 31.

Meloni “was berated by the political opposition on Saturday after her plan to process up to 3,000 asylum-seekers a month in Albania was rejected by Italian judges for a third time,” reported Politico.

Key U.S. Representatives and Senators recently urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately revoke the stop work orders that the Department issued on January 24, 2025, to 10 national resettlement agencies.

“This unprecedented order threatens to deprive refugees already in the United States of the vital assistance known as Reception and Placement (R&P) services, which help them during their first three months in the United States as they rebuild their lives here,” the letter said.

The stop work orders “undermine legal obligations that the Department has entered into through its contracts with U.S.-based and intergovernmental organizations, increasing new arrivals’ vulnerability to homelessness and food insecurity at a time when they still have no lifeline for support,” the letter said.

The R&P program covers basic needs like rent, food, clothes, and furnishing
in the first few months after arrival, “providing core services for refugees who often resettle with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.” Barring R&P services, including Virtual R&P available to self-traveling Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), “will cause undue and unnecessary suffering and hardship, breaking a promise we made to the refugees and SIVs when we approved them for resettlement in America.”

Among his first wave of executive orders signed on Jan. 20, President Trump suspended the U.S. refugee program.

“As one of the 10 refugee resettlement agencies in the U.S., HIAS is dismayed at the Trump administration’s decision to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program,” the immigration and refugee group said. “While the suspension indicates the opportunity for case-by-case exceptions, it will place refugees waiting overseas for admission in immediate potential danger.”

“America is at its best when we welcome refugees,” said HIAS President Mark Hetfield.  “We are appalled by the callousness that this administration is taking toward victims of violence and persecution. Refugee resettlement is a safe and legal pathway, it is a longstanding, bipartisan tradition, it strengthens our national security, and it brings enormous economic and cultural benefits to our communities.” HIAS is ready to work with the Trump administration to restart the program as quickly as possible and to continue to provide an orderly and secure pathway for refugees who have fled religious and other forms of persecution. “

Global Refuge, one of the nation’s oldest and largest refugee resettlement nonprofits, expressed profound concern over today’s suspension of the USRAP.

“The refugee program is not just a humanitarian lifeline through which the U.S. has shown global leadership. It represents the gold standard of legal immigration pathways in terms of security screening, community coordination, and mutual economic benefit,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Global Refuge.

She noted that refugees “undergo rigorous vetting, including multiple background checks by national security agencies, before ever setting foot on American soil. Their integration is coordinated through close collaboration between federal agencies, local stakeholders, and nonprofit organizations, including many faith-based groups, positioning them to quickly become vital contributors to their new communities. The US Refugee Admissions Program was designed and ameliorated over four decades precisely to address the concerns used to suspend it today.”

“As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost of silence,” writes Michael Luo in the New Yorker, drawing parallels with Chinese exclusion efforts in the U.S. in the late 1800s.

“The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States,” he writes in his piece, “History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism.”

Luo notes that much of the anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1800s in the U.S. was driven by economic anxiety experienced by white workers in the West.

But he cites studies showing that the removal of Chinese workers did little in the way of helping those workers.

“One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in direct competition with white workers.”

This past fall, a group of economists released a working paper on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Western states, noted Luo.

“They found that it took a significant toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese populations––until at least 1940.”

The economists also found “no evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese immigrants in the workforce, “including the economies of scale achieved by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that emerged from their absence,” the article noted.