Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration paused most of the refugee resettlement in the United States. The few refugees who were allowed in the country came mostly from South Africa’s white Afrikaner community.
That will largely remain the status quo into 2026, as the executive branch announced last week it will admit 7,500 refugees into the country for the fiscal year.
How does that number stack up to previous administrations?
Daniel Braaten, an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University – San Antonio who studies refugee resettlement, spoke to Texas Standard about the what the policy shift means. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So how does the federal government’s refugee cap for 2026 compare to previous years?
Daniel Braaten: Well, this would be the lowest on record. The previous lowest was during the first Trump administration, which was a cap of 18,000. So this would be much lower.
Is there anything that you draw about an administration’s broader policy goals by its approach to refugee resettlement?
So it’s obviously part of the larger Trump administration anti-immigrant policies, right, where you see ICE arrests and stopping other forms of immigration. So this is just a piece with that.
And the way the law works, the president does have the authority to set the cap and the State Department and Department of Health and Human Services and the Homeland Security – so all part of the executive branch – have a role in vetting refugees. So presidents and administrations have a lot of authority over this policy. So it’s not surprising, given the Trump administration’s general anti-immigrant policies that they would be reducing the numbers so low.
What I will say is that it also, I mean, focusing on white South Afrikaners, frankly, is a view from the administration of a sort of white nationalist view, right? That they don’t want to allow anybody who’s not white, basically, into the country as a refugee.
That is, in terms of refugee resettlement, a total anomaly based on our history. And that goes for Republican and Democratic administrations.
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Well, thinking about the refugees that are already living in the United States, has there been any withdrawal of support here – whether that’s by governments or nonprofits – as far as you can tell?
The support is kind of a mixture of government support and nonprofit support. And the way the process works is the 1980 Refugee Act allows nonprofits who are certified by the State Department to be the main source of distributing aid to refugees who are resettled. And there are ten of them and most of them have a religious affiliation, but not all of them.
And they operate in, you know, 49 out of 50 states and Washington, D.C. And then they have affiliates across the country.
So in Texas, you have many of them operating. One is called Global Refuge. It was formerly Lutheran Social Services. So they have local groups in the state that help resettle refugees and distribute the money that is given to them through the federal government to refugees.
So with that, when the numbers go way down, those nonprofits have to lay off staff because there’s not as much, quote unquote, “work” for them to do. And this happened during the Trump administration, the first one, where they reduced the number of refugees and a lot of these nonprofits had to lay off staff.
Then the Biden administration increased the cap each year of the Biden administration to 125,000. And so then some of these nonprofits were not able to do as much because they didn’t have as many workers from the previous layoffs.
So this kind of up and down of allowing a lot some people in and then drastically reducing has a big impact on these nonprofits and the staff they hire to help resettlement.
So we’ve been talking about this cap at a national level. Do we have an idea what those numbers look like for Texas specifically?
Texas is one of the largest resettlement states. And since 2012, Texas has resettled about 8% to 10% of refugees nationwide.
