A new directive from the U.S. government would allow refugees to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and has local resettlement agencies alarmed and scrambling for answers.
Immigrants who came to the U.S. as refugees could be detained after one year of arriving in the country under a new policy from the Department of Homeland Security. According to a Feb. 18 memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, refugees must either have obtained a green card within one year of arrival or "present themselves to the agency" to avoid detention.
Joanna Krause is executive director of Canopy of Northwest Arkansas, Arkansas's leading refugee resettlement agency. She calls the directive an alarming shift in policy.
"This is absolutely shocking. It's awful. This is not how the United States refugee program has ever been run. Refugees have gone through every single level of vetting, with every single security tool that the U.S. has at its disposal," she says.
When refugees enter the U.S., they hold a separate legal status for 12 months, at which time they must apply for permanent legal residency through a document commonly called a green card.
"The wait time for processing can be a year, two years, three years — so that someone or their family and their children could perhaps be detained or put into custody, potentially removed, because they don't have a green card due to a processing delay, a federal government processing delay. It's just egregious to even think about."
According to the memo, which comes from a Minnesota court filing on behalf of DHS, "when a refugee is admitted to the United States, the admission is conditional and subject to a mandatory review after one year." This contradicts prior policy that failure to apply for a green card was not grounds for deportation. The memo also states that refugees could be detained for the duration of their application process.
Vetting for refugees is often long and complicated, and can take years of security and health screenings by the U.S. government — usually in a third-party country or refugee camp — before ever stepping foot on U.S. soil. Krause explains that the pathway to gaining permanent residency or citizenship is another costly hurdle.
"And again, the refugee resettlement program in the United States has always used every safety and security and counterterrorism measure and mechanism that our nation has at our disposal. So to potentially destabilize the program in this manner is shocking and frankly a very wasteful use of resources. If we're going to put people into custody and force them to potentially go through this whole process again — it's been done."
Officials with national resettlement agencies like Canopy's parent organization, Global Refuge, estimate the new policy could impact tens of thousands of refugees, mostly those who resettled under the Biden administration. Canopy has resettled nearly 1,000 refugees in the region since opening in 2017, and Krause says she has not yet heard directly from USCIS or DHS about the policy and is unsure how it will impact refugees in Arkansas.
"But I casn tell you, in the short term, what it creates is a tremendous amount of fear. People who are living in our community, who are working in our community, who are going to school in our community, living their life, contributing, paying taxes, following all rules and regulations — are now experiencing this whiplash of will they be able to be secure and continue on with what the United States promised when we, as a nation and as a community, provided refuge?"
This change is one in a list of the federal government's efforts to limit pathways to citizenship. In November, the government froze the green card application process for people of 19 nationalities, even if they were already in the country as refugees, including Afghan immigrants. And in December, the Trump administration said it would be reviewing the status of all refugees who entered the country under President Biden.
Krause, whose organization had its funding cut when most resettlement was halted at the beginning of 2025, says Canopy has also not had direct communication with federal agencies on these new directives.
"We really worked collaboratively, and if there was a change in federal policy, it would generally be communicated in a timely fashion to stakeholders who are responsible for implementation or could assist with guidance for people in the community where these policies may be relevant — and that's not happening. As of this moment, I personally have not received official communications about the rollout or guidance. I'm still learning from the national news."
USCIS and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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