Trump Is Deploying Every U.S. Refugee Officer to Just One Country

In the fall of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security had employees in dozens of countries, from Peru to Turkey, to vet the most vulnerable and persecuted individuals in the world for potential entry into the United States.

Just one year later, those screeners were working in just one country: South Africa, where the Trump administration has singularly focused U.S. refugee resettlement efforts on the country’s white population.

As of June, all but three of the 7,730 refugees admitted into the U.S. in fiscal 2026 were from South Africa, according to newly released State Department data, an exponential increase from the one South African admitted in the fiscal year before Trump took office.

The situation is “unprecedented,” said Brandon Prelogar, who led the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ International and Refugee Affairs Division in the opening months of the Trump administration and has worked in several government roles in the refugee space since 2004. “It’s the only place the refugee corps has been deployed to.”

“Usually you circle to other places, but here they’re just having people come in and out” of South Africa, said another former senior USCIS official briefed on current procedures.

USCIS did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.

When President Donald Trump moved back into the White House last year, he quickly paused refugee admissions. USCIS subsequently began repatriating all of its refugee corps that had been deployed abroad.

Soon after, Trump made an exception for Afrikaners in South Africa, tasking the government to prioritize the ethnic minority group that governed the country during apartheid as “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” In the year plus since, he’s reshaped the entire system to this end.

Claims of white genocide in the country have been discredited. But Trump and Elon Musk, who is South African and previously led DOGE for the Trump administration, have long made the alleged persecution of Afrikaners a talking point. Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly clashed over the subject during a dramatic Oval Office meeting last year.

Within USCIS, many of the initial changes implementing the refocus on Afrikaners happened behind closed doors, from the top down. All-hands meetings were canceled soon after the start of the second Trump administration, so it was more difficult to find out about the work of the agency, said Jason Marks, who worked on both refugee and asylum issues at the agency for over a decade before taking the administration’s deferred resignation offer last year.

“You started to hear, ‘So-and-so’s going to South Africa,’” he said. “It was almost like, are we being trolled here? Is this like a trolling exercise?”

Jen Smyers, a former deputy director of the Health and Human Services refugee office who left when Trump took office, also initially questioned the veracity of Trump’s order.

“I read it and thought it was an Onion article, and then, no, it was very real,” Smyers said.

Concentrating resources on one group of people is “just unheard of,” Marks said. “To basically repurpose the entire refugee program and concentrate all of its resources on one location for one politically and racially favored group and then exclude everyone else is, frankly, heartbreaking.”

A former senior USCIS official said the Trump administration has changed the definition of a refugee to accommodate Afrikaners.

“The standard for what is considered a refugee has been changed, has been sort of lowered so they can meet this population’s concerns,” the former official said. “Our law has a different bar that wouldn’t normally meet their definition for persecution.”

Typically, refugee processing is a years-long process involving multiple entities, including the United Nations refugee agency, although that organization said it wasn’t involved in the vetting of the first group of Afrikaners that arrived in the U.S. last spring.

The speed at which people from South Africa were brought to the U.S. is “remarkable” compared to the typical process, Marks said. The former senior USCIS official said the administration was “expending a massive amount of resources” on each refugee, calling the per-capita allocation unprecedented.

The United States admitted more than 100,000 refugees in 2024. A year-and-a-half later, fewer than 18,000 are being admitted annually. Trump’s administration has slashed capacity of the web of agencies that undertake the typically years-long process of identifying, screening and admitting refugees into the country.

The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration was so gutted by mass layoffs that the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, an entirely domestic agency, took over its international operations. The Administration for Children and Families, the HHS arm that houses the refugee office, itself shed 31% of its staff under Trump.

USCIS, responsible for the primary vetting and interviewing of refugee candidates, has shed half of its refugee corps since Trump took office.

The agency also began pushing its refugee corps to accept deployments to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to work on administrative matters largely involving immigrant records. Despite their misgivings, one-fourth of refugee officers accepted the temporary assignments due to pressure they felt from management. Last year, for the first time, the agency also began hiring officers with law enforcement duties including making arrests, carrying firearms and executing warrants.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow last year tasked staff with reviewing the cases of all refugees admitted into the United States under former President Joe Biden. Michael Knowles, a USCIS asylum officer of 34 years who retired in October but still represents asylum and refugee staff as part of the American Federation of Government Employees, said that work has been highly labor-intensive and has only validated the prior administration’s work.

For USCIS workers, their jobs have now manifested their biggest fears.

“My staff was petrified about what the Trump administration would do to them,” Prelogar said. “Their most widely imagined concerns ended up being verified as legitimate ones.”

Prelogar said refugee officers sign up for their work to help “some of the worst off people on planet Earth,” while also protecting against national security threats.

“To be redirected to a population that doesn’t pass the laugh test as far as being one who we would normally be admitting into the U.S., I think it has been wildly disheartening for staff to pivot to that sort of population,” he said.

The president has significant latitude over the U.S. refugee system in responding to changing global dynamics, and they’re charged by law with setting the target number of refugees to be admitted each year. But multiple sources told NOTUS any efforts to rebuild the decimated infrastructure of the system in the future could be arduous.

“Let’s say the president resigned today, and all of a sudden the vice president decided he wanted a strong refugee program — it would take a long time to rebuild that infrastructure,” a second former USCIS official told NOTUS.

In the meantime, the system is only working for South Africans. Earlier this year, Trump increased the refugee cap for 2026 by 10,000 — with all additional slots reserved for Afrikaners.

“A lot of people were vetted, approved and are now just shut out,” said Marks, who had previously been working on the Biden-era initiative to resettle vulnerable Afghans following the exit of the U.S. from Afghanistan. The Trump administration has since discontinued that program.

“It’s devastating,” he said.