EAST LONGMEADOW, Mass. — In a gray-walled, institutional hall usually reserved for prosaic debates over traffic and town budgets, Mohamoud Abdirahman rose from the audience last month and approached a panel of five town councilmen sitting in judgment.

Civil war had forced his family to flee their native Somalia in 1991, when he was a child. The Abdirahmans traveled for two days by cargo ship to Kenya, where they stayed for a year and a half before securing refuge in the United States. Now, it was his turn to fight for those trying to follow his footsteps to this town abutting Springfield and the Connecticut border.

“A lot of people like me just want a second chance at life,” an emotional Mr. Abdirahman pleaded.

A similar refrain is echoing across the country in town councils, county commissions, mayors’ offices and governors’ mansions after an executive order signed by President Trump in September granted local politicians a veto over the placement of refugees in their communities.

That order has carried the national tension over the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda from the halls of Washington and detention camps along the southwestern border to places like East Longmeadow, population 16,000, and turned refugees and those who work to resettle them into lobbyists of sorts.