The End of Refugee Resettlement

On a brisk morning this past fall, I took a taxi up the sloped roads of a densely populated neighborhood in the eastern part of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The neighborhood, called Jabal al-Joufeh, was historically home to merchants, politicians, and poets. More recently, it has become an informal settlement for refugee families.A Sudanese woman, Hiba, who wore a full-length navy dress and a leopard-print head scarf, greeted my car on the street. She ushered me up a flight of stairs to the one-bedroom home that she shared with her husband, Ibrahim, and their three children. (Both names are pseudonyms.) The living area, tidy and sparsely furnished, was lined with several mattresses; it doubled as the children’s bedroom. The insulation was poor, and the home had no heat. A gray curtain hung on a single window, and soft light seeped around the edges and into the cool, incense-infused air.“We had some furniture that we sold because we assumed we were not going to spend another winter in Jordan,” Hiba told me. A portable heater, a gas cylinder, sofas, and carpets—all had recently been unloaded. Ibrahim entered the room, limping slightly—the result of an injury he’d sustained in Sudan—and sat on a mattress. He was thin and wore a loose sweatsuit. The couple’s six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, played in the next room. The elder son, whom I’ll call Amar, was at school.The family belongs to Sudan’s Nuba minority, a Black, ethnically diverse group of some three million people indigenous to the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan, an oil-rich, agricultural region next to Darfur. Various armed groups have long vied for control of the area, and have been accused of engaging in a campaign of atrocities against the Nuba and other communities there. In 2013, Hiba and Ibrahim survived an attack that killed some of their family members; they were displaced several times.Ibrahim, whose legs were severely beaten in the incident, was unable to access proper medical treatment, and was in unrelenting pain. The family weighed their options. In early 2019, the brutal Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir verged on collapse, and the security situation in the country was uncertain.

At that point, many Sudanese people were travelling to Egypt or Jordan with short-term visas. Hiba had heard that migrants were sometimes subjected to human and organ trafficking in Egypt. The prospects in Jordan seemed better. There, the family would be able to register with the United Nations Refugee Agency, or U.N.H.C.R., which could help them gain access to medical care and other services, and potentially refer them for resettlement in a third country.Jordan has long been a magnet for refugees fleeing wars in the surrounding region, hosting millions of Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Somalis. Many see Jordan as a way station to permanent resettlement in Canada, the United States, or Europe, where the economic opportunities are better. But the bureaucracy of resettlement can stretch on for years, and by the early twenty-tens Jordan had one of the largest per-capita refugee populations on earth. (A tiny fraction of refugees worldwide are ever permanently resettled.) It began to implement policies to curb the influx. Unbeknownst to Hiba, the government had asked U.N.H.C.R. to suspend registering asylum seekers who arrived in Jordan after January 23, 2019. She and her family arrived on January 24th of that year, meaning that they had no viable path to resettlement through the agency. Within months, their visas lapsed. Since then, they have been living without legal status, financial aid, or health insurance.Ibrahim’s injuries prevent him from working, so Hiba supports the household, often picking up private cleaning jobs from Facebook ads. A recent gig turned out to be a setup; when she arrived to clean the home, two men were waiting for her, and tried to grope and rape her—a common experience for refugee women, according to humanitarian agencies. There’s little incentive to report such incidents, as Jordanian authorities regularly round up and deport people who work without permits.Black refugees in Jordan have described widespread racially motivated attacks and discrimination. This is true for adults and children alike. Amar, who is nine years old, has been hit and bullied at school; once, a classmate strangled him. Recently, Hiba told me, he was walking to the neighborhood pharmacy when he was attacked and robbed by a group of locals.

He screamed and broke free, but Hiba said that, afterward, he started wetting the bed at night and praying that he would die. “Why did God create me Black?” he would ask her. “Is this punishment?”“I told him to love yourself the way you are,” Hiba said. “I told him that God created us different, that the color Black is very distinguished—it’s very unique and very beautiful.” She went on, “I do my best to maintain his hope.”In June, 2023, the family received a lifeline. A Sudanese acquaintance in Jordan informed them about an organization that helps refugees resettle in the United States. It was called the International Refugee Assistance Project. Hiba completed IRAP’s online form, and about eight months later, after several interviews, IRAP selected the family’s case for review and referral into the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. According to lawyers, the family was “at imminent risk of deportation and refoulement to Sudan,” where, Hiba said, they fear “violations or even death” on account of their ethnicity. By then, Sudan had plunged into a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which have both been accused of war crimes against non-Arab communities. (Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. State Department said that the R.S.F. and its allies committed genocide.)In December, 2024, the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency that works with the State Department to process refugee-resettlement cases, called the family for an interview. The vetting process to become a refugee in the U.S. is among the most robust and painstaking immigration procedures in the world. The interview, which covered their family history, claim for refugee status, and biographical information, was meant to be followed by another with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as various medical and security screenings and a final orientation about U.S. culture. “I recall being ecstatic that this was going to happen, that I could build a better life,” Hiba said. “We were moving at a very expedited pace.”Hiba began to sell their belongings. The twins daydreamed about eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and painting their new bedrooms pink and blue.

Amar hoped to enter the medical profession. He already liked to produce “medicines,” made with toothpaste and other household items, and read about Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Hiba imagined seeing snow for the first time and living in a cold state, such as Ohio. She wanted to study journalism or become an artist-architect, like Zaha Hadid. She bought a celebratory dress, with gold-flowered embroidery, for the plane ride. She hung it in her wardrobe as a good omen.On the morning of January 21, 2025, Hiba received a phone call from a friend. President Donald Trump, just hours into his second term, had issued an executive order titled “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program.” The policy suspended entry for all refugees and halted decisions on refugee applications; it also caused federal agencies to freeze millions of dollars in funding for resettlement. Hiba felt her body enter a state of shock, and she began sobbing. “It’s like we were flying up in the sky and suddenly we fell down,” she told me.Hiba gathered Ibrahim and the children. Ibrahim tried to reassure her. “Inshallah, maybe it will just be a suspension for one or two months,” he said. “Maybe there will be exceptions for certain cases.” Amar felt something more foreboding. He recalled an Arab proverb: in a dish of lamb liver, “the unlucky person finds bones.”As news spread of the suspension of the U.S. refugee program, chaos ensued. More than a hundred thousand people had been conditionally approved for resettlement, and many had been waiting for years. Refugee advocates and resettlement agencies called the order arbitrary, capricious, and illegal. The Refugee Act, passed by Congress, with bipartisan support, in 1980, requires the President to consult with lawmakers when establishing a ceiling for refugee admissions each year, based on humanitarian concerns. Before leaving office, Biden set the ceiling at a hundred and twenty-five thousand. Trump had unilaterally blocked any effort to reach it.Federal agencies stopped processing refugee cases almost immediately. More than twelve thousand people whose trips had already been scheduled had their flights cancelled. The order stranded them indefinitely, sometimes in life-threatening conditions.

In some cases, families were separated. One Sudanese family of ten had spent years living in the Kakuma refugee camp, in northwestern Kenya. All but two of them—the elderly mother, who was in her mid-seventies, and an adult daughter—had resettled in the U.S. They were meant to travel to Washington State just days before Trump’s Inauguration. When they boarded their flight in Nairobi, officials pulled the daughter aside. The fingerprints that she had to submit for her resettlement application were slightly smudged, and she needed to obtain new ones, they told her. She was unable to get them before the ban, and was sent back to the refugee camp. (The mother, meanwhile, made it to Seattle.) “All of these people are just stuck,” Lawrence Bartlett, the former director of refugee admissions at the State Department, told me. “And they’re not going to move.”In the lead-up to the suspension, IRAP had more than two hundred and fifty clients in Jordan. It scrambled to figure out what to do. Elisa Vari, a senior staff attorney based in Amman, told me that she had been expecting “delays, increased scrutiny, and security checks,” but that the reality—a “complete and indefinite halt”—was far worse than she feared. “It seemed too cruel,” she said. “The law should be more predictable than this.”For decades, the U.S. accounted for more than two-thirds of refugee resettlements globally, often accepting more than all other countries combined. When the Refugee Act was passed, then President Jimmy Carter said that it reflected the country’s commitment to being a “haven for people uprooted by persecution and political turmoil.” Former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, one of the co-authors, has portrayed the act as a corrective to the moral failure of refusing entry to many Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Toward the end of the Cold War, it allowed many who were fleeing Communist regimes in Europe and Asia to find safe harbor in America.In 2024, more than a hundred thousand refugees were admitted to the U.S., mostly escaping violence and instability in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. “