Refugees settled in the US are in a terrible limbo and fearful of being deported while they wait to see how they will be treated by Donald Trump’s new administration, advocacy groups and experts say.

They told the Guardian that the attacks on refugees during the election campaign had already had a chilling effect and that since Trump’s election win, refugee families had been in contact asking for advice about whether they faced being deported.

One expert said the president could virtually stop new refugees coming to the country amid the continuing Syrian crisis.

Anxieties were heightened on Monday when Kris Kobach, currently secretary of state for Kansas but rumored to be on the shortlist for a cabinet post, possibly as leader of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was photographed going into a meeting with Trump with documents that outlined aggressive proposals to bar the entry of Syrian refugees and reinstate a national registry focused on Muslims.

Although Trump’s team has denied that the president-elect supports a Muslim registry, as a candidate he repeatedly expressed his openness to the idea on the campaign trail. He emphasized the need for a database of Syrian refugees, but refused on multiple occasions to rule out a Muslim registry when presented with the question. On one occasion, he claimed that resettled Syrians might rob their neighbors.

Reports of hate crimes have spiked since the election and newly released FBI data shows that hate crimes against American Muslims rose sharply last year.

“We have all been shocked at the level of vitriol used by some people who are running for office regarding refugees,” said Lee Williams, vice-president of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).

The US is the global leader in refugee resettlement and historically, the program, backed by the USCRI, has received bipartisan support and is an element of US foreign policy. But after the Paris terror attacks last year, Republicans, led most forcefully by Trump, began to withdraw support for it. A number of Republican governors refused to work with the federal government to resettle Syrians in their states, citing unfounded terror concerns. And Trump’s routine on the campaign trail included criticizing refugees and migrants and promising to “shut down” entry to Muslims.

At an April rally in Rhode Island, Trump mentioned that Syrian refugees had been recently resettled in the state. The crowd began to boo. Trump continued, suggesting without any evidence that Syrians could break into residents’ homes. “Lock your doors, folks,” he warned.

Williams said the scapegoating of refugees, especially ones from Syria, had sent tremors through the community.

He said in the past week the organization had received calls from families already resettled in the US wondering whether they would be deported. Similarly, refugees currently moving through the lengthy screening process to come to the US are fearful the new administration will stop taking refugees altogether, throwing them back into limbo.

“These are people who by definition have been forced to flee because of violence, their ethnicity, their religion or who they love,” Williams said. “The last thing we want to do is have people who are traumatized to end up being resettled in a community where they may face violence as a result of their ethnicity or background.”

A closer look at the papers revealed by Kobach showed a “strategic plan” for the DHS in the first 365 days of a Trump administration. At the top of Kobach’s list of recommendations was to “bar the entry of potential terrorists” and to both update and reimplement a program instituted by the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks that tracked individuals from “high-risk areas” of the world. Known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), the program was based on the country from which an individual migrated but was widely regarded by the media at the time as a Muslim registry. Kobach, who served in the justice department under Bush, was a chief architect of NSEERS.

The world is in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since the second world war. An estimated 4.8 million Syrians alone have fled the country since the civil war started in March 2011, mostly to neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.



In his last year in office, Obama raised the number of worldwide refugees the US accepts from 85,000 this year to 110,000 over the next fiscal year.

The US has accepted nearly 14,000 Syrian refugees since last October and surpassed its goal of accepting 10,000 in the 2016 fiscal year, according to data from the state department’s Refugee Processing Center.

Trump’s election also casts doubt on the future of a series of groundbreaking refugee-related pledges made at an Obama-led summit on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in September.

The Obama administration persuaded more than 30 countries to roughly double resettlement places for refugees, increase humanitarian aid for refugees by $4.5bn, provide education to 1 million more refugee children, and potentially improve access to legal work for another million adults.

“Put simply, this could be a total, historic disaster for refugee resettlement to the US,” said Clara Long, a researcher with the US program at Human Rights Watch.

She is worried that if the US were to stop accepting refugees, countries in Europe might follow suit, especially the ones where politicians there have whipped up similar xenophobic fears.

With Trump’s history of shifting on position, advocates say they are hopeful cooler heads in Congress and his cabinet will keep him from implementing his proposals on refugees.

During his campaign, Trump proposed a “Muslim ban”. In a statement from December 2015, the businessman called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and claimed that there is “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population”.

Since then, the proposal has gone through numerous iterations but the text of the original statement remains on his website.

Candidate Donald Trump tells a news conference on 15 February in Hanahan, South Carolina, that the state should not be taking in displaced Syrian refugees. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

At present, Trump’s team has said it plans to “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur”. It’s unclear how they define “terror-prone”, but it would almost certainly describe Syrians, who, combined with Afghans and Somalis, account for half of the world’s refugees.

Following Trump’s election, the state department said that it could not comment on the effect that his administration would have on Obama’s initiative. But at the time of the summit, assistant secretary of state Anne Richard admitted that the enactment of the pledges would in part depend on the priorities of the next administration.

Perhaps not by coincidence, Obama met last week with six-year-old Alex, who wrote to the president offering his home to a Syrian refugee child after an image of the child sitting bloodied and dazed in an ambulance sparked shock and outrage.

“You being so nice, and kind, hopefully makes other people think the same way,” Obama told the boy.

“You being so nice, and kind, hopefully makes other people think the same way. So I was very proud of you.” Remember Alex, the six-year-old boy who wrote to President Obama to ask how he could help kids his age in Syria? Last week, the President had a chance to meet Alex and his family at the White House. Watch their visit and learn how you can support refugees at home and abroad at the link in the bio. A video posted by The White House (@whitehouse) on Nov 17, 2016 at 5:34pm PST

The president has broad authority over the resettlement of refugees, said Susan Fratzke, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute who has worked in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees, and migration. In this respect, she said, Trump could virtually stop refugees from coming to the US after he takes office.

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the US “doesn’t know anything” about the refugees it admits. However, Fratzke explained the US has one of the most extensive screening systems of any country in the world. The process typically takes between 18 months and two years and includes multiple security checks across several agencies.

Legal experts and advocates will be watching closely to see how Trump proceeds. A ban on Muslim refugees, for example, might violate the constitutional right to freedom of religion, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University. “A lot will depend on his discretion,” Yale-Loehr said. “President-elect Trump stated in his victory speech that he will be fair to everyone. Let’s hope he keeps that promise to immigrants.”

In the meantime, advocates are urging the 45th president of the United States to honor the country’s longstanding, bipartisan tradition of accepting refugees.



“For decades, the United States has been at the forefront of resettling those fleeing violence, offering safe haven to hundreds of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of both world war II and the Vietnam war with significant bipartisan support,” the International Refugee Assistance Project said in a statement released after Trump’s electoral victory.

“In line with this tradition and America’s most fundamental values, we urge the president-elect to keep our doors open to those in danger.”