Refugees face ‘grave harm’ after ICE memo allows arrests for those without green cards, advocates warn

The Trump administration is threatening thousands of recently arrived refugees with arrest and indefinite detention if they have not yet received a green card.

An internal memo, revealed in court documents Wednesday, marks a stark reversal of long-standing policy that protected legally present refugees who have not yet obtained a green card in their first year in the United States.

Under the administration’s new policy, those refugees must report to Homeland Security or face arrest and detention in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 25 years of refugee protection work,” said Beth Oppenheim, CEO of international refugee advocacy organization HIAS. The group fears “grave harm” for people who were welcomed to the U.S. after fleeing violence and persecution, only to be targeted by ICE.

“This memo was done in secret, with zero coordination with the organizations that serve refugees,” she said in a statement. “It is a betrayal of our values and our legal commitments, and it will cause extraordinary harm.”

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The memo was published in court filings surrounding a legal battle over the arrests of refugees in Minnesota. At the end of last year, the Trump administration surged more than 3,000 federal immigration officers to the state to make thousands of arrests, including dozens of recently resettled refugees.

A federal judge temporarily blocked ICE from detaining the roughly 5,600 refugees in the state, stating in a ruling last month that “refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully — and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested and detained without warrants or cause in their homes or on their way to religious services or to buy groceries.”

The memo was revealed one day before a court hearing in the case, which stems from a lawsuit accusing ICE officers of arresting refugees at immigration check-in appointments, on their way to work or school, and at their doorstep without a warrant. Others were shackled and sent to a detention center in Texas, more than 1,200 miles away.

Homeland Security is now ordered to “take the affirmative actions of locating, arresting, and taking the alien into custody,” according to the latest memo, which is signed by ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons and U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow.

The memo revokes previous guidance that determined a refugee’s failure to adjust their legal status was not a “proper basis” for removal or detention.

The latest Trump policy “is a transparent effort to detain and potentially deport thousands of people who are legally present in this country, people the U.S. government itself welcomed after years of extreme vetting,” Oppenheim said.

“They were promised safety and the chance to rebuild their lives. Instead, DHS is now threatening them with arrest and indefinite detention,” she added.

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There are many reasons why a recently resettled refugee may not yet have adjusted their legal status within a first year in the country, including delays in processing requests, language barriers and difficulty navigating the country’s byzantine immigration system.

How quickly that paperwork can be processed after a refugee’s first year in the country is completely out of their control, lawyers and advocates tell The Independent.

The new policy instead “weaponizes” what is a routine administrative step in the resettlement process as a pretext for arrest and detention, according to Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of refugee advocacy group Global Refuge.

“These are families the United States government already screened more rigorously than any other category of immigrant,” she told The Independent. “Only after years of background checks, biometric screenings, and in-person interviews were they invited to rebuild their lives here. To now subject them to arrest and open-ended detention is a stunning betrayal of both our legal commitments and our moral compass.”

President Donald Trump directed an overhaul of the nation’s refugee admissions program last year to study whether allowing refugees into the country was even in the nation’s interest, upending the lives of thousands of people who were already approved for entry or in the process of resettling in the U.S.

The administration instead has explicitly prioritized admissions for white South Africans and put a ceiling on the overall number of refugee admissions each year to just 7,500, down from 125,000 in the previous fiscal year.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is reviewing thousands of refugees who were lawfully admitted to the country under the Biden administration, while Homeland Security broadly canceled legal protections for roughly 1 million immigrants who entered the country during that time.

The Minneapolis-St.Paul area is home to roughly 80,000 people of Somali ancestry, the vast majority of whom are legal residents or American citizens. But the president — seizing on a series of fraud cases involving government programs where most of the defendants have roots in Somalia — surged officers into the state as part of his nationwide effort to deport millions of people.

In a statement announcing “Operation PARRIS” to target refugees in the state, Homeland Security officials said Minnesota is “ground zero for the war on fraud.”