A lawsuit filed by aid groups argues the Trump administration’s freezing of federal funds for refugees is illegal.
Trump signed an executive order hours after coming into office to indefinitely suspend all entry for refugees, along with any decisions on refugee applications.
A similar freeze happened during the first Trump administration. But Melissa Keaney, senior supervising attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project’s litigation department, says this latest effort is broader and indefinite.
“The core of our argument is that this is a program that has been created by Congress, and it’s carefully prescribed how it’s supposed to operate through statutes, and the president doesn’t have the authority to with the stroke of a pen undue all of that,” she said.
Keaney’s group is representing plaintiffs including three refugee admissions groups and nine individuals who are either refugees or U.S.-based sponsors. She says her group and others successfully challenged the first admission’s shutdown back in 2017, but the effect it had on refugees is still felt today.
Rachel Levitan, chief global policy and advocacy officer with the refugee admission agency HIAS, says days after the initial admissions closure, her group received a stop work order when federal funding for the program was shut off.
“We’ve had clients who sold everything … their house, their belongings, and made their way to the transit centers where they needed to wait until they would get on a flight the next morning and travel to the U.S. ... They were stuck,” she said.
Levitan says the lack of funding has also impacted resettlement efforts for refugees already in the U.S.
Just over 27,300 refugees were admitted to the country during the last fiscal year, according to data from the U.S. State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, including almost 900 in Arizona.
