70 Organizations Urge DHS, USCIS to Rescind Rule Stripping Refugees of Legal Protections

Seventy organizations across the United States are formally urging the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to rescind a rule that strips refugees of legal protections, in a joint appeal led by the national resettlement agency Global Refuge and reported on November 9, 2026.

The demand is directed at DHS, the Washington, D.C.-based department that oversees the U.S. refugee system under Secretary Kristi Noem, and at USCIS, the component agency that adjudicates refugee status and related immigration benefits. Global Refuge, which organized the coalition's call, is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, and works with the U.S. Department of State to place newly arriving refugees in American communities.

The organizations describe the rule as unlawful and contend that it removes protections refugees have relied on since Congress built the modern U.S. refugee framework through the Refugee Act of 1980. Their request for rescission asks the two agencies to withdraw the measure administratively rather than leave the question to the federal courts, where statutory challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act can take years to move through district courts and the courts of appeals. An agency that adopted a regulation retains the authority to withdraw it.

Under long-standing federal law, a person admitted to the United States as a refugee is authorized to live and work in the country, may apply for lawful permanent residence after one year, and can naturalize after five years as a permanent resident. The coalition argues the rule strips away legal protections built on those statutory foundations, deepening uncertainty for people who followed every requirement of the program.

The stakes are especially high for African refugees. The appeal directly concerns Somalis, Congolese, Sudanese and Eritreans already living in the United States, along with nationals of those countries still in the resettlement pipeline, populations with close family and community ties to Kenyan and East African diaspora communities in American cities. Many of those households include relatives who arrived as refugees or remain queued for resettlement abroad.

African admissions have been central to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, known as USRAP, in recent years. After admissions fell to a record low of 11,411 in fiscal year 2021, the program rebounded to 100,034 admissions in fiscal year 2024, the highest annual total in three decades, with nationals of the Democratic Republic of the Congo the largest single country-of-origin group that year. Somalis, Sudanese and Eritreans have featured consistently among the African nationalities admitted under the program.

Kenya sits at the center of that pipeline. The Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps, both opened in the early 1990s, have for years hosted large Somali, Sudanese and Congolese populations, many of them referred by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, for possible resettlement in the United States. Family links between those camps and the American diaspora are extensive, and U.S.-based relatives have often waited years for approved family members to be cleared to travel.

The rule also lands in a landscape already transformed by policy. President Donald Trump suspended USRAP on January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, under Executive Order 14163, Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program, halting travel for refugees who had completed approval and security screening. The suspension froze the pipeline that had been rebuilt after 2021 and left refugees approved for U.S. resettlement in Kenya's camps and elsewhere waiting indefinitely.

For refugees already in the United States, the coalition contends, the measure adds a new layer of risk to communities established over decades. The Minneapolis, Minnesota, area is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, with a second major hub in Columbus, Ohio, while Congolese refugees have been resettled in significant numbers in cities including Louisville, Kentucky, and Syracuse, New York. San Diego, California, and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, both long-standing resettlement hubs, are home to sizable East African populations, including Somalis and Eritreans.

Global Refuge carries decades of institutional weight in the effort. Founded in 1939 as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and renamed Global Refuge in 2024, the organization has partnered with the federal government on refugee reception and placement for more than eight decades, and the appeal it organized gathered 70 signatories demanding that the rule be withdrawn in full.

Neither DHS nor USCIS has announced any plan to withdraw the rule. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an agency may rescind a regulation through the same notice-and-comment process used to adopt it, which means any reversal would be proposed in the Federal Register and opened for public comment before it could take effect.