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Anahita Panahi has spent the last year trying to put out fires set by Trump 2.0.

Panahi, who leads the refugee and asylee advocacy work at the California-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles, has gotten used to public policies that are gratuitously cruel toward immigrants. She has spent months now navigating extreme interpretations of provisions in the federal code to make life all-but-unendurable for asylum seekers and would-be-refugees, as well as other categories of immigrants. She has watched as Trump reduced the annual refugee admissions cap in the U.S. to 7,500, down a stunning 94 percent from what it was during Joe Biden’s presidency, and proceeded to reserve most of the remaining spots for white Afrikaners from South Africa, leaving in limbo overseas more than 130,000 refugees who had already been cleared by the U.S.’s extremely thorough vetting process but are now unable to journey on to the United States.

On February 18, however, Panahi found herself stunned by a memo sent by the Department of Homeland Security to field agents, stating that refugees who have been in the country for more than a year and still don’t have their green cards will now be subject to arrest and indefinite detention while their cases are reviewed, approved, and processed. “This is probably one of the most unprecedented memos — introduced to impose trauma on refugees,” Panahi concluded.

“This is probably one of the most unprecedented memos — introduced to impose trauma on refugees.”

“This is probably one of the most unprecedented memos — introduced to impose trauma on refugees.”

Under the terms of Section 209, which were added to the Immigration and Nationality Act under the terms of the Refugee Act of 1980, vetted refugees who arrive in the U.S. have to wait a year before they can receive permanent residency and thus their green cards — although they can start the application process during these months. After a year, they can get their green cards, though how long that takes is largely out of their hands, depending on the speed at which the government processes applications and schedules mandatory interviews. And while they have no green card they can be returned to the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security for “inspection and examination.”

The statute’s language around this is, however, ambiguous. It does state that after a year, refugees without green cards can be “returned” to the “custody” of immigration authorities. Over the decades, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have taken the language to mean that after a year they would be “returned” to some form of oversight by immigration authorities, not that they would be newly incarcerated. As multiple immigration attorneys told Truthout, the government has........

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