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refugees
When Refuge Is Rescinded: Hypocrisy and Our American Dream
The United States cutting off refugee resettlement domestically while waging a war that forces people to flee their homes abroad is a flagrant act of hypocrisy that is incompatible with the American Dream.
May 19, 2026
“Hip hip, hypocrisy! Hip hip, hypocrisy!” My teenage son pumped his fist in the air. I can’t remember the chain of conversation that ultimately produced this sardonic version of “hip hip, hooray!”, but the phrase has quickly become a way to get each other to smile or self-reflect, and it often leads to a bout of shared laughter. But recently, this chant has also allowed me to reflect on the fraught crossroads of my homeland and my emerging life’s work; specifically, the troubling hypocrisy of the United States’ recent actions on two interconnected global issues—forced migration and war.
I grew up in small-town Virginia, in a family that nurtured an honorable form of gratitude-based patriotism. As a doctoral student who studies refugee issues and forced migration, I have long been proud of the United States’ global leadership in refugee resettlement (while also believing that we should do more to support refugees). From the 1980s to early 2000s, the US routinelyresettled more refugees annually than all other nations combined. While this began to shift following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, there were only four years between 2002 and 2022 in which the US did not resettle the most refugees of any country in the world, coming in second to Canada in each of those four years. In 2023, our nation welcomed more than double the number of refugees resettled the previous year, and in 2024, we resettled over 100,000 refugees for the first time in 30 years. But unfortunately, US resettlement took an abrupt turn in 2025.
In an executive order issued on January 20th, 2025—the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term—the Trump presidency announced the suspension of the US refugee resettlement program. Another executive order followed on February 7, identifying South African Afrikaners as a group worthy of resettlement despite unverified claims of race-based persecution and misalignment with the globally recognized definition of refugeehood. Since October 2025, approximately 4,500 Afrikaners and three refugees from Afghanistan have been admitted under the US refugee resettlement program.
At the same time, our country’s leaders have waged war in the Middle East, creating “a new cycle of displacement” that continues to worsen. Whether or not you agree with the rationale behind this war, our country’s actions are increasing forced displacement on a global scale. Recent estimates project that this war has already forced up to 3.2 million Iranians and 1.3 million Lebanese citizens to flee their homes, and this number will almost certainly increase as the conflict continues. Furthermore, areas of the Middle East affected by the current war already host 24.3 million forcibly displaced people. As a scholar-in-training who cares deeply about both forced migrants and the United States, the hypocrisy of cutting off refugee resettlement domestically while acting in ways that force people to flee their homes abroad is excruciating.
The United States is simultaneously closing our doors to refugees and actively increasing the number of forcibly displaced people in the world.
But there’s also a double hypocrisy here, a vocal hypocrisy layered on top of this more tacit one. For years, President Trump has complained that other countries don’t pull their weight in NATO and the US shoulders an oversized portion of defense spending among the alliance. By the same logic, the US should pull our weight in supporting refugees, period—and especially when we are contributing to increases in global forced displacement. “Hip hip, hypocrisy.”
I hear you—don’t we have enough unmet needs among US citizens? Shouldn’t we fix everything in this country before we offer others permanent protection here? While there are many responses to these questions, for me the most compelling is summed up by Rabbi Sharon Braus, who maintains that “ultimately, the problem of the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.”
The figures I’ve presented here are so much more than numbers—each one is a living, breathing person who has loved ones and a favorite color, and who also happens to have survived the harrowing experience of being forced to flee their home due to circumstances entirely outside of their control. Refugees are exceptionally resilient and resourceful people who contribute strength, wisdom, talent, tenacity, (and yes, taxes) to our society, helping us to address our collective needs together. Refugees are part of “we” and “our”—part of [the] “US.”
And yet, the United States is simultaneously closing our doors to refugees and actively increasing the number of forcibly displaced people in the world. The promise of America is not zero-sum—it is generative and generous and transformative. The American Dream I believe in includes not only those of us who were born in the US and have benefited from living here through no virtue of our own, but those who were born elsewhere and have been displaced from their home nations through no fault of their own.
As a future forced migration scholar, a deep longing for my homeland to treat refugees and other forced migrants with compassion, respect, and dignity has become a central feature of my own personal American Dream. Join me and make it an indispensable part of our collective American Dream!
Together, let’s not shy away from this needed and worthy work. Stand with me by imagining what it would be like to start over in a new place, talking about refugees and other migrants in humanizing ways, befriending a newcomer who might benefit from connection, or sharing this op-ed with a friend or loved one who might need to read it. The circle of our family grows as we expand it together, until the day we reach a full-throated “hip hip, hooray!”
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The Jingoist States of America: Our Cruel Mistreatment of Asylum Seekers
At such a moment in history, a movement that connects the dots between our many struggles is certainly the way forward. The plight of refugees—and how we treat them as a society—is a story that connects us all.
Apr 20, 2026
In late March, I sat in the gallery of the Supreme Court for the first time in my life. Throughout my 30 years of grassroots anti-poverty work, I’ve joined countless protests and vigils outside the Court. In 2018, I was even arrested and held in detention for praying on its palatial steps. Now, I was seated with a clear view of the nine justices of the nation’s highest court. I was there as a guest of immigrant rights lawyers, as their team made oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the most significant case on the right to asylum in decades.
In February, the Kairos Center (the organization I direct) authored an interfaith amicus brief on that very case, alongside 31 denominations and organizations representing faith traditions practiced by billions worldwide. Those groups, including the Alliance of Baptists, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Hindus for Human Rights, the Latino Christian National Network, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Reconstructing Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, and the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, joined together to declare that our societal obligation to provide for persecuted outsiders is a universally shared moral principle.
Although the case has largely flown under the public radar, there is indeed a lot at stake. Filed on behalf of asylum seekers, Noem v. Al Otro Lado focuses on the legality of a 2018 Trump border policy blocking access to the U.S. asylum process for people arriving at the border with Mexico. Immigrant rights advocates argue that such a turnback policy, under which immigration officers physically stop people seeking safety at official border crossings from setting foot on U.S. soil, flouts decades of settled federal immigration law and our society’s most deeply held legal and moral values.
For more than a century, the government has been required to undertake a legal process of inspection when people seek asylum at official ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border (as they must inspect all noncitizens seeking admission to the United States). That requirement is supposed to ensure that this country doesn’t send vulnerable people back into danger without first allowing them to seek protection. A wide range of immigration lawyers and legal experts argue that the first Trump administration’s turnback policy, euphemistically called “metering,” directly undermined the government’s responsibility to process such asylum claims. As a result, vulnerable children, families, and adults were regularly forced to remain indefinitely stranded in perilous conditions in Mexico.
Although the turnback policy has not been in effect since 2021, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared it unlawful, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the case. Should the government win (which is all too possible given the hyperpartisan nature of the current Court), the consequences are sure to be grave and far-reaching. The Department of Homeland Security would have the legal backing to turn away untold thousands of desperate people at the border, potentially clearing the way for even more expansive border closures, while further intensifying the jingoistic nationalism that defines the Trump administration. Alongside other landmark cases this term, like Trump v. Barboza, in which the government seeks to undo the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the results of Noem v. Al Otro Lado are likely to reveal the lengths to which the Supreme Court is willing to backstop the president’s assault on democracy, including accelerated attacks on the rights of vulnerable populations.
The day I was there, the existential stakes of that case and the larger societal crisis in which it was unfolding did not seem to concern the court’s conservative justices. I had the words of George Washington (written in 1788 to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp) in my mind as I sat in the gallery: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”
Unfortunately, having heard the statements and reactions of some of the judges, I fear that the majority of the Supreme Court may no longer agree with that foundational vision for this country.
Courtroom Friezes and Draconian Law
The first thing that struck me on entering the Supreme Court gallery were the stone friezes on the walls of the room. Designed by Adolf Weinman more than a century ago, those large marble reliefs, featuring what he called the “great lawgivers of history,” tower over the space. Among them are prominent religious figures like Moses (holding a scroll of the Ten Commandments), King Solomon, Confucius, and a rendition of the Prophet Muhammad (that is entirely unrecognizable). The friezes also include Roman Emperor Octavian (otherwise known as Caesar Augustus, Jesus’s great nemesis), French King Louis IX (leader of the seventh and eighth crusades), and Draco (a Greek jurist whose legacy lurks in the word “draconian” because of the extreme measures he took to punish minor offenses).
As I stared at those figures, I reflected on the message they convey about the complex civilizational lineages from which the Supreme Court and our legal system derive their authority. In our amicus brief, we reflected on those varied lineages as they pertain to the right to seek asylum:
“Our asylum laws are the modern embodiment of a deeply rooted religious, cultural, and historical heritage that has consistently affirmed society’s obligation to provide refuge for those seeking safety. Asylum reaches back to some of the earliest moments of recorded human history. It was practiced throughout the ancient civilizations that forged the foundation of Western society. This tradition can also be found in the form of church sanctuary asylum, a mainstay of European culture for over a millennium.
“Our very nation began as a haven for persecuted political and religious minorities. This tradition is present throughout our history, from the practices of Native Americans to the Underground Railroad to modern times. Congress adopted our current asylum laws in significant part due to the efforts of faith-based groups seeking to uphold deeply held societal, moral, and cultural principles.”
Despite such deeply held and ancient principles, I couldn’t shake a sense of impending doom as I scanned the faces on the friezes and those of the justices. I thought of the awesome and awful power of Rome, depicted throughout the gallery, and its draconian reign of “peace” (or what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently termed “delivering peace through strength”). And I recalled the worsening anti-democratic and pro-oligarchic turn our own Supreme Court has taken in the Trump era.
Just consider the rulings from the past few years: the Court has essentially given immunity to the executive branch (although the Court is supposed to be a critical part of a federal system of checks and balances), criminalized homelessness (although the U.S. claims to be a nation of opportunity and prosperity for all), and degraded voting rights (cutting off the legs of our democracy).
Before oral arguments began in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, I was under no illusion that the Supreme Court delivers equality, freedom, and justice for all. And yet, on an issue as basic and legally sound as the right to seek asylum, I was still shocked by the flippancy of the court’s conservative judges. For hours, they rocked in their chairs, physically broadcasting their disinterest in the case. Rather than take seriously more than 100 years of legal precedent and hundreds more of long-established societal practice, they seemed to enjoy getting into hyper-specific and cherrypicked semantic and rhetorical arguments with Kelsi Brown Cochran, our lawyer.
In preparation for that day, I had brushed up on the history of U.S. asylum law. An important story in that history is the S.S. St. Louis, a ship that in 1939 was carrying 930 refugees from Hamburg, Germany, fleeing the Nazi regime, who were first denied entry to Cuba and then to the United States, only to be returned to Europe, where many of them were taken to the Nazi death camps.
Reflecting on that story at a pre-hearing press conference, Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, a plaintiff in the case, offered this explanation:
“The right to seek asylum is not a policy preference or a loophole — it is a legal right and a moral commitment forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Seeking asylum is not like taking a number at a deli counter and waiting for your turn. You cannot ask someone fleeing rape, torture, or death threats to wait in danger indefinitely because a government has decided their lives are inconvenient. We filed this case because the United States has an obligation to follow its own laws — laws duly enacted by Congress. The question before the Court is whether those laws can be set aside by executive action, or whether they remain binding at the border, as written.”
In their apparent willingness to flout precedent and condemn modern-day asylees to harm or even death, the conservative justices unselfconsciously aligned themselves with American nativism and European fascism of the 1930s. If, in their final decision, they uphold Trump’s turnback policy, they will be affirming that, were the S.S. St Louis to sail again today, the ship would still be denied entry and its passengers asylum.
The Moral Crisis Is Not “Border Surges” But the Closing of the Border
The morning of those oral arguments, the Kairos Center and other faith organizations held an interfaith prayer vigil on the steps of the Supreme Court to call attention to the case. Reverend Michael Neuroth, director of the United Church of Christ’s Washington D.C. office, put the matter vividly: “Welcoming and protecting the stranger is not a minor tenet of our faith but is a foundational moral obligation in each of our traditions. Dismantling the right to asylum is morally wrong, strategically short-sighted, and increases insecurity here in our nation. We must be a nation of compassion, a place of refuge to those in need.”
The vigil was organized in the heart of the “holy season” amid Ramadan, Passover, and Easter. As billions of people globally engage in rituals of remembrance, repentance, deliverance, and liberation, our prayers and petitions focused not only on the legal precedent for the right to seek asylum, but on the moral imperative to do so. For Christians, protecting and welcoming the immigrant is one of Jesus’s first and most powerful teachings. It’s also among the highest moral commands of the Torah. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “Do no wrong to the foreigner and do not shed innocent blood.” Asylum and societal hospitality are well-recognized rights within Islamic law and theology, a fundamental Hindu and Buddhist tenet, and part of Native American spiritual teachings.
In our interfaith amicus brief, we wrote: “As the many faiths practiced by this country’s citizens teach, a society that does not protect the least among us is a failed society.” As faith leaders, we had in mind not only the right to seek asylum, but the many ways the Trump administration has deepened and intensified a moral crisis at the heart of our society. We were thinking about the ongoing attacks on immigrant communities — from ICE-led campaigns of terror to family and child detention in places like Dilley, Texas. There was also the stripping of life-saving healthcare and food support from millions of Americans through cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); the criminalization and forced deprivation of LGBTQ+ people; and the prosecution of anillegal war that threatens the lives of so many in Iran and the broader region, as well as the livelihoods of billions of us across this globe.
In Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration is attempting to mask its cruelty and despotism through banal legal arguments. By focusing semantically on when protections start for asylum seekers and debating the meaning of the term “arrives in” (as in this country, of course), its lawyers were ignoring the illegality and immorality of border agents blocking asylum seekers from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border and the larger question of whether the United States can any longer be a place of safety and protection for all families “yearning to be free” of violence and persecution.
The government is, of course, hoping that we don’t make the connections between the stripping away of asylum rights, the larger issue of immigrant rights, and the many other ways that it’s targeting “the least among us.” That’s a mistake we can’t make and where the teachings of our many faith traditions have encouragement to offer. In Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and more, love, justice, and peace are not parceled out only for certain people in certain places. Across our religions, all life is sacred, full stop!
No Turning Back for Anyone
Intermixed with the important lawgivers of history in that marble frieze in the Supreme Court gallery are engraved winged personifications of “Peace,” “The Rights of Man,” “History,” “Authority,” “Fame,” and more. Those winged characters form what looked to me like a Greco-Roman “choir of angels,” proclaiming “law and order” at the expense of rights and dignity for us all.
Sitting there, I reflected on just who was not in that room listening to those arguments or forcing the Supreme Court justices to face the very lives impacted by their decision. I thought about all those who will never have access to that courtroom, or justice of any sort for that matter, the millions of people struggling to fight for their communities and a future where everybody is in and nobody is out.
Those people are — or at least should be — our hope. They are the true “choir of angels” who came out for the recent No Kings Day demonstrations and are standing up for the rights and dignity of communities all over the country. They are also the people who are increasingly giving Donald Trump historically low approval ratings. And here’s the truth of these times: this administration has nothing to offer everyday people, other than hardened borders and wars that nobody wants.
At such a moment in history, a movement that connects the dots between our many struggles is certainly the way forward. Therefore, it seems fitting that the coalition that came together to fight this case and protect the rights of asylum seekers calls itself “No Turning Back.” It reminds me of a song by Emma’s Revolution that I’ve sung many times at protests and gatherings. Its key lines are a reminder of what we all need to keep in mind in this deeply disturbing Trumpian moment of ours:
“Gonna keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Never turning back
Never turning back”
Because indeed, there can be no turning back for any of us. Either we get there together or we never get there at all.
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Human Rights Groups Denounce Trump Plans to Send Cubans Fleeing Impacts of Blockade to Guantánamo
“The continued use of Guantánamo Bay, which has an extensive history of abuse and torture, is horrific and unconscionable."
Apr 10, 2026
Dozens of human rights organizations sent a letter to Congress on Friday, decrying threats by US military officials to detain Cubans who flee to the US to escape President Donald Trump's crushing economic blockade at Guantánamo Bay.
The 86 groups, which include the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Victims of Torture, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and Refugees International, zeroed in on remarks made by US Marine Corps Gen. Francis Donovan, the commander of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month about how the military would respond to the mass influx of Cuban refugees to the United States.
The risks of a refugee exodus from Cuba were sparked in January after Trump tightened the already brutal regime of economic sanctions by threatening to slap harsh tariffs on any nation that provided oil to Cuba. The result has been a crippling fuel shortage that has caused routine blackouts and disrupted every facet of daily life, from hospital care to food cultivation.
Trump enacted the fuel blockade in what he has described as an effort to coerce the government to step down from power and make way for one more amenable to the interests of American companies. With Cuba in a weakened state, he has threatened to "take" the island outright using American military force.
The United Nations has warned that if the blockade is prolonged, it could bring about a total "humanitarian collapse.”
Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) about what would be done if this caused a mass influx of Cuban refugees to the US, Donovan said they had an executive order that would involve coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security to handle a "mass migration event."
Donovan said it would include using the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, “where we would set up a camp to deal with those migrants or any overflow from any situation in Cuba itself.”
“Given the well-documented history of abusive and unlawful detention at Guantánamo, any proposal to use the base for additional detention is deeply troubling and unacceptable," the organizations wrote on Friday,
They note the prison’s history as a site used for extrajudicial torture during the global War on Terror and as a holding facility for other migrant groups, including Haitian refugees and asylum seekers who fled a military coup in the 1990s, many of whom were subjected to substandard living conditions.
"Time and again, we have seen the US government try to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole to mistreat migrants, subjecting them to inhumane conditions and interfering with both their right to seek protection in the United States and their right to counsel," said Pedro Sepulveda, a litigation fellow for the International Refugee Assistance Project.
Despite pledges from multiple presidents to close the camp for good, it remains open more than two decades after former President George W. Bush began using it to detain hundreds of terrorism suspects without trial.
Trump has expanded its use during his second term, using it to temporarily hold more than 700 migrants since February 2025—including dozens of Cubans rounded up by immigration agents.
Trump’s use of the camp marks the first time it has been used to hold people detained in the continental United States. A Washington Post investigation from February found that those in the facility were subject to weeks-long periods of isolation, invasive strip searches, and denied contact with lawyers.
The human rights groups called on Congress to block any funding that could be used to detain Cubans fleeing Trump's blockade and to shut down Guantánamo Bay for good.
"The president has held Guantánamo detention as a threat over the heads of migrants in the United States and now threatens the same over Cubans who may be forced to flee their homes as a result of his own actions," said Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Victims of Torture.
Michael Galant, the senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said, “If the Trump administration is worried about Cuban migration, the solution is simple: Stop intentionally impoverishing the Cuban people through an embargo and fuel blockade.”
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