President Donald Trump’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will begin re-vetting refugees resettled in American communities by the Biden administration, a new report details.
An internal USCIS memo, obtained by CBS News, details the administration’s plan to have a second look at hundreds of thousands of refugees whom the Biden administration brought to the U.S. over the course of four years.
CBS News reports:
The memo, dated Nov. 21 and signed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow, instructs agency officials to investigate the cases of refugees who entered the U.S. over a four-year period, between Jan. 20, 2021, and Feb. 20, 2025. [Emphasis added]
Edlow directed USCIS officials to review the cases of all refugees admitted during this time period, and to potentially reinterview them. Those investigations and reinterviews, Edlow wrote, would focus on determining whether those individuals met the definition of a refugee when they entered the U.S. and whether there are any legal barriers that would make them ineligible to become permanent residents of the U.S. [Emphasis added]
As a result of the re-vetting, USCIS officials are pausing pending green card applications from refugees who were resettled under President Joe Biden.
The Trump administration has hugely reduced the refugee resettlement program to more manageable levels. For Fiscal Year 2026, the refugee cap has been set for 7,500. This is not a cap to meet but rather a numerical limit by which the administration will not exceed.
This is a 94 percent reduction in the refugee cap compared to Biden’s last year in office, when he set the cap at 125,000 refugees.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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