Among the hundreds of measures that Donald Trump has signed in his second term as president of the United States, one of the first was the suspension of the National Refugee Admission Program. This executive order adds a deadly blow to the UN resettlement program, since the US is the country in the world that accepted the largest number of beneficiaries: 69% of the total in 2024.
The measure was blocked only a month later by a federal judge on the grounds that such a decision exceeded the responsibilities of the administration. This followed other judicial orders but, de factothe State Department has terminated contracts with the main national organizations that worked on the implementation of the program, and both the indefinite prohibition of accepting refugees and the freezing of funds remain in force despite the calls of all organizations.
This Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was pronounced again, which has already blocked other Trump anti -immigration measures, indicating that the Administration must resettle thousands of refugees who already had scheduled flights towards the US before January 20 (when Trump took possession) and that they were canceled due to the executive order. Previously, the Government had declared that it will only reset 65 Afghan refugees in the coming months.
Reinsaite is a little known tool, but essential for those asylum applicants and more vulnerable refugees. It consists of the transfer of these from a country in which they had already sought protection to a third party that grants them a permanent or long -term residence permit. It is aimed at those most vulnerable people who need urgent protection, such as survivors of violence or torture, women and children at risk and other individuals with physical or legal protection needs.
More than 50% of the beneficiaries are women and girls, because they often face very serious risks in their reception countries where they usually live in refugee fields, recalls Haruno Nakashiba, senior resettlement coordinator and complementary roads of the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR). “For them, it can be a solution that saves their lives and their only opportunity to rebuild a future in security conditions,” says this representative in an email.
The beneficiaries of this program are identified and selected by UNHCR, although the final decision is at the discretion of the host country. In 2024, 116,528 people were resettled worldwide. Of these, around 80,000 (69%) were admitted in the United States. The rest went mainly to Canada, Australia, Germany and other countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Spain, which for more than a decade breached its quotas to reset refugees, has admitted “more than 5,000 since 2011 ″, according to data from the Ministry of Interior, and 742 in 2024, according to UNHCR.
The decision worsens a situation that was already worrying before Trump arrived at the White House, since the 116,528 refugees effectively reappeared last year are a very small part of the 2.4 million that needed to be.
With the American withdrawal, the remaining figure will be significantly lower, this is added that in 2025 the projections are not very flattering: ACNUR estimates that 2.9 million people will need to be resettled, that is, 20% or 500,000 more than the previous year. The reason for this increase is the prolongation of situations that cause massive population displacements, such as the war in Syria – where, despite the fall of the Bachar regime the Asad last December, still 6.2 million Syrians live as refugees outside the country. They also contribute the emergence of new conflicts, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the impacts of climate change in the form of floods, earthquakes or droughts, which in 2024 forced 6.6 million people to leave their homes, according to the internal displacement monitoring center (IDMC by its acronym in English).
Given the new scenario, with the wounded death program, ACNUR has asked states to redouble their efforts to ensure that those who most need resettlement have access to it. “Each resettlement square counts and must be valued, since it can help save a life from danger. Even a quota considered relatively small is an important gesture of solidarity and valued by refugee reception countries,” says Nakashiba.
The consequences in the US
The United States created its resettlement program in 1980, with the unanimity approval of the refugee act in Congress, and that is why Seattle Jamal Whitehead alleged in its ruling at the end of February that Trump could not suspend operations, since that would imply an “effective annulment of the will of Congress”. “The president has a wide margin of discretion to suspend refugee admissions. But that authority is not unlimited,” said Whitehead, according to AP.
Since 1980, this country has accepted more than three million refugees. Until now. And the effects of the decision begin to notice. “More than 30,000 people who arrived in the previous months have lost access to essential services. Tens of thousands remain in Limbo abroad, including 1,600 Afghans that had been approved by the Department of National Security (DHS) but saw their flights canceled at the last minute,” says Refuge Point, one of the reference organizations in the country.
The reasons for the new administration to dictate the executive order is that the country has been “flooded” of requests. “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large amounts of migrants, and in particular refugees, in a way that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans (…),” reads the text of the order. The United States is the country with the highest number of foreign population in its territory: 47.8 million migrants in legal situations in the country. Another 14 million live in an irregular situation. But, in the case of refugees, those “great quantities” (the three million hosted in the country since the 1980 law was approved) represents 0.88% of the 340 million inhabitants in the US.
Faced with the reasons that adduces the White House, there is a study published last year by the Department of Health and Human Services of the United States that concluded that, in the course of 15 years, refugees and asyons contributed 123.8 billion dollars (about 114,000 million euros) more to the country’s economy than what they received in services.
