One of the chief priorities of the Trump White House has been to dismantle the refugee system, which has existed, with broad bipartisan support, since 1980. Within the first week of Trump’s Presidency, his Muslim ban temporarily froze the resettlement of refugees in the U.S. and cut the over-all number of people whom the federal government would allow into the country. Every year since, the White House has lowered the annual refugee “ceiling,” which now stands at eighteen thousand, down from more than a hundred and ten thousand, at the start of 2017. But the President hasn’t limited his attacks on the system to Washington. A provision of the Muslim ban, for instance, specified that individual states and localities should be allowed to refuse to accept refugees. At the time, it wasn’t clear how states could do so, but the premise was obvious: if the White House could turn refugee resettlement into a partisan wedge issue, Republican-controlled states might abandon the program and side with the President.
On September 26th, Trump issued an executive order requiring that every local and state jurisdiction sign a consent letter in order to resettle refugees. If a governor or county commission failed to produce a letter, the U.S. State Department, which oversees the process, would effectively consider that jurisdiction ineligible for resettlement. The order was designed to put additional pressure on local officials, by forcing them to opt in to the resettlement program rather than opt out. “A lot of governors and state officials don’t want to make this decision,” Jen Smyers, of Church World Service, a resettlement agency, told me. “Immigration has always been the jurisdiction of the federal government, and they don't believe it’s their role. At first, some officials would also say, ‘If I sign to let refugees in, is that going against the President?’ ”
These questions intensified after Trump, at a campaign rally in Minnesota, in October, complained about the number of Somali refugees who have settled in the state in recent years. “Leaders in Washington brought large numbers” of them, he said. The crowd booed, on cue, then cheered when the President announced that he would give states and cities an opportunity to prevent more refugees from coming. “No other President would be doing that,” he said.
Each year, nine refugee-resettlement agencies across the country bid for contracts with the government. This time, at the behest of the White House, the State Department added a caveat to the application: the federal government would not resettle refugees in a particular place unless consent was provided in accordance with the executive order. Meanwhile, a few weeks after Trump signed the order, officials at the State Department told resettlement groups that they planned to contact mayors and governors to request consent letters from them. But the department never did; a month later, the resettlement groups had to start conducting outreach on their own. “The best way to get someone not to write a letter is to not tell them they need to do it,” Smyers said.
The resettlement agencies have until mid-January to file their applications. There are roughly six hundred counties in the U.S. where refugees are resettled—a letter will need to be sent from all of them, in addition to letters from forty-nine governors; the State Department can refuse to renew the existing contracts for any of the resettlement groups working in these counties and states. Multiple political appointees at the State Department have told resettlement groups that the agency had been planning to reduce the number of providers in the coming fiscal year anyway. On January 8th, a federal judge will hear a legal challenge to the executive order brought by the International Refugee Assistance Project. “Congress has set out a statute for how the President can make the decision on resettling refugees,” Melissa Keaney, a lawyer with the group, told me. According to her, the executive order violates the statute by granting local governments the ultimate say. “It’s ironic that the Administration is saying it wants to give this power to the states,” she said. “The President has repeatedly defended his immigration actions by saying that the issue is solely the province of the executive.”
The Burleigh County Commission meets every two weeks in a small room at a municipal building in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota. Early this month, a crowd of more than a hundred assembled outside the meeting to debate whether the county should continue accepting refugees. The state’s Republican governor had issued a consent letter, in November, and two counties immediately followed suit. But Trump’s executive order requires every county where refugees might be resettled to sign off. In Burleigh County, a particularly conservative enclave where twenty-four refugees were settled in the past year—out of a population of ninety-five thousand residents—local Republican representatives called for a vote. There wasn’t enough space in the usual meeting spot to accommodate all the residents who showed up, so the commission rescheduled the session for the following week, in the cafeteria of a local middle school. The session reserved for public comment on the issue lasted nearly four hours. In the end, in a 3–2 vote, the county commission decided to continue resettling refugees.
So far, not a single state or locale has said it would end refugee resettlement. Of the thirty-one consent letters that have been signed by governors, a third have come from red states such as Utah, Arizona, Iowa, and Indiana. “I have to be honest,” Brad Wilson, a Republican legislator in Utah, told the Washington Post. “I don’t have any idea why it’s a partisan issue nationally. It’s never been one here. Regardless of political party, we value [refugees].”
The Trump Administration was caught off guard by the positions taken by Republican-controlled states. Just before Thanksgiving, after the governor of North Dakota submitted his consent letter, the White House organized a phone call with governors’ offices to “enhance state and local involvement” in resettlement. Those invited to participate were given only a few days notice.
The call was led by a political appointee named Andrew Veprek, a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Veprek, who was formerly a low-ranking foreign-service officer, has risen inside the Trump Administration after initially being detailed to the White House, in 2017, as an “immigration adviser.” He has since become a close ally of Stephen Miller, the President’s senior policy adviser, and is a frequent opponent of U.S. involvement in United Nations initiatives on migration and human rights. In one memo, in which he criticized a U.N. document that condemned racism, Veprek wrote, “The drafters say ‘populism and nationalism’ as if these are dirty words. . . . There are millions of Americans who would likely describe themselves as adhering to these concepts. (Maybe even the President.)”
The area where Veprek exercised the most control, though, was in setting the refugee ceiling. “He single-handedly shut down the State Department policy-making process to produce his own outcome,” a former department official told me. Veprek was also “one of the architects” of the recent executive order, according to several former officials who worked with him at the State Department. On the call with governors, Veprek tried to sound impartial, but he repeatedly recommended that states abdicate their responsibility. “State and local officials should not do anything right now,” he said at one point, according to multiple people on the call. “The burden is on the resettlement agencies. States and localities do not have to send anything to the State Department.”
One state of particular interest to both the White House and to resettlement groups is Tennessee, where Bill Lee, the first-term Republican governor, has spent the last several weeks weighing his decision. In 2015, after a string of terrorist attacks in Paris, a group of about thirty state officials across the country called for a halt in refugee resettlement until governors could vouch for the safety of the program. One of them was Tennessee’s moderate Republican governor, Bill Haslam, who was then in his second term. The model eventually adopted by the Trump White House, to allow states and cities to refuse to resettle refugees, originated in a series of measures introduced by members of the Tennessee state legislature. “For the past decade,” Stephanie Teatro, the executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, told me, “Tennessee has been a testing ground and a bellwether for anti-refugee sentiment.”
Teatro and other activists have managed to scuttle dozens of anti-immigrant measures over the years. In September, 2016, after a concerted campaign led by immigrants’-rights groups, Haslam changed his stance on the resettlement of Syrian refugees, claiming to be satisfied that the federal government was adequately vetting them. When the state legislature passed a resolution calling on the Attorney General to sue the federal government over the refugee program, he declined to pursue it.
This week, I spoke with Bill Dunn, a Republican state representative from Knoxville and the speaker pro-tem, who said that he supported resettling refugees in Tennessee. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Politically, it’s easier just to punt. But we should be doing our part.” In 2011, Dunn sponsored a bill that required state resettlement agencies to meet with county officials in advance of refugees’ arrival because of “the burden” imposed by newcomers on local communities. State advocates, like the Tennessee Refugee and Immigrants Rights Coalition, worried at the time that the measure “would encourage local governments to pass symbolic resolutions to discourage further refugee resettlement.” Dunn’s bill eventually passed, but, in the years since, he has defended a raft of pro-refugee measures, and he’s taken obvious pride in being a moderate presence on the issue in the state legislature.
On Wednesday, Governor Lee announced his decision. “The United States and Tennessee have always been, since the very founding of our nation, a shining beacon of freedom and opportunity for the persecuted and the oppressed,” he said in a statement. “I will consent to working with President Trump and his Administration to responsibly resettle refugees.” I asked Dunn if the governor’s decision implied a conflict with the President. “Not really,” he said. “Trump came across as supporting states’ rights on this.”
