The Department of Homeland Security issued a memo on February 18 authorizing immigration officers to arrest and indefinitely detain refugees who have not obtained green cards within one year of arriving in the United States. The policy rescinds a 2010 memo that explicitly barred detention for failure to adjust immigration status.
The administration’s legal basis is the Immigration and Nationality Act itself. The statute uses “shall” when directing refugees to apply for permanent resident status after one year — mandatory language, not discretionary. Refugees who have not applied are technically afoul of the law, regardless of how prior administrations chose to treat noncompliance.
Signed by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, the new directive treats the one-year mark as a mandatory re-vetting checkpoint. Refugees who don’t appear voluntarily for interviews face arrest. Those who raise “red flags” during examination can be stripped of status and placed in deportation proceedings.
The memo demands refugees complete a process the government itself froze. In December, USCIS announced a pause on all applications — including green cards — for people from countries on the president’s travel ban list. Somali refugees in Minnesota, the primary targets of ICE’s “Operation PARRIS” enforcement surge, cannot complete the process the government now demands they finish on time.
A federal judge in Minnesota temporarily blocked ICE from detaining 5,600 refugees in the state after organizations sued in January. The DHS memo appeared in court filings one day before a scheduled hearing in that case.
Refugee organizations estimate tens of thousands nationwide could be affected. HIAS CEO Beth Oppenheim said the memo was drafted in secret with no coordination with resettlement agencies. Krish O’Mara Vignarajah of Global Refuge called it “indefensible” to detain refugees for failing to complete a process the government itself delayed.
The International Refugee Assistance Project is asking the court to declare the new policy unlawful.
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