The United States is on track to accept a historically low number of refugees in the 2018 fiscal year.

Only about 20,000 to 21,000 refugees will be admitted to the country by the end of September, according to an estimate from NBC News. That’s far less than the limit of 45,000 refugees that Trump set for this year, itself a historically low target.

Former Trump administration officials and human rights advocates told NBC News that the huge gap between the two numbers is because the FBI has “dramatically slowed the pace of security reviews for refugees in recent months… [as] part of an intentional bid by White House hardliners to restrict the number of refugees allowed in the U.S.”

For comparison, when former President Barack Obama set a limit of 85,000 refugees for the 2016 fiscal year, the United States ended up accepting 84,995 refugees. (The limit fluctuated between 70,000 and 85,000 refugees throughout Obama’s presidency.)


For the 2017 fiscal year, Obama raised the limit to 110,000 refugees. While the United States initially seemed on track to meet that threshold, accepting nearly 26,000 refugees between October and December 2016, in the end, the country only accepted 53,716 refugees, according to State Department figures. The decrease in refugee admissions to the United States was sharper than any other country in 2017, according to Pew Research Center.

Several factors impacted that steep drop, including the two versions of Trump’s Muslim ban — the first signed in January 2017 and the second signed in March 2017 — that suspended all refugee resettlement for 120 days. Then, after the ban expired in October, Trump announced a new “deeper vetting” process for refugees from 11 countries: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (People from seven of these countries are also targeted in Trump’s current Muslim ban, impacting eligibility for immigrant and non-immigrant visas.)

The new restrictions made it even harder for refugees to come to the United States, and data at the time showed a 40 percent drop in the total number of refugees admitted in the five weeks after the new vetting process was introduced.

In regards to 2018 numbers, a former official who wanted to remain anonymous told NBC News that the FBI’s slow pace was the main reason for the sharp drop.

In response, the FBI said in a statement that it is “not able to release the number of applications we have reviewed, but in the course of carrying out our duties the FBI takes the necessary time to thoroughly review all the information available.”


Trump campaigned on the promise of “extreme vetting” for refugees. But even before he came into office, the refugee screening process was already very thorough — and time consuming. The average application process could take up to two years.

In addition to causing a drop in admitted refugees, Trump’s new immigration policies have also significantly hurt Muslims. The drop in admitted Muslim refugees in 2018 has been greater than any other religious group, according to Pew Research Center. Christian refugees also accounted for a much greater proportion (63 percent) than Muslim refugees (17 percent) in the first half of the 2018 fiscal year. In 2017, those numbers were much closer, with Christian refugees making up 47 percent and Muslim refugees making up 43 percent.

(Photo Credit: Pew Research Center)

In addition, there has been a sharp drop in the total number of Iraqi refugees who worked with the U.S. military in battle. According to Reuters, 5,100 such Iraqis were accepted in 2016 and more than 3,000 in 2016. As of August 15, only 48 Iraqis were admitted through the refugee program.

Stephen Miller — one of the key architects behind Trump’s draconian immigration policies — would not be an American citizen if Trump’s proposed immigration policies were in place when his great-grandfather immigrated to this country, as his uncle pointed out in a scathing op-ed in Politico detailing their Jewish family’s history.

“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” he wrote.