By Kimahli Powell, Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
In one of the most sweeping reversals of refugee protections in modern U.S. history, the Trump administration has ordered the re-interrogation of every refugee admitted between 2021 and 2025, more than 200,000 people whose cases had already undergone multilayered security screening, interagency review, and final approval. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adjudicators are now authorized to reassess this entire cohort, reopening protection claims that were considered settled under U.S. and international law. Green-card adjudications for this group have been frozen, leaving families once again suspended in uncertainty.
In my years leading Rainbow Railroad, I witnessed every day how fragile a sense of safety can remain for people fleeing persecution. I sat with individuals who had escaped targeted violence only days earlier; people who crossed borders overnight, who hid in safehouses because they had been identified by police or militias, and who carried the weight of years lived underground. I have met survivors whose trauma was still visible in their breath and posture as they spoke, and I have held the memories of those we could not reach in time. Even for those who ultimately resettled, the fear that protection might be withdrawn never fully disappeared; it shaped how they moved through the world, how they approached official processes, and how they navigated a fragile promise of safety. In 2023, I helped establish a mechanism to allow LGBTQI+ refugees to resettle to the United States through the Welcome Corps private sponsorship program. When I read that more than 200,000 refugees may now see their cases reopened, I think of those people first. For them, the reopening of a file is not a procedural act, it is the return of a fear they believed they had finally outrun.
But the re-vetting directive transforms that persistent fear into policy. One week before the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive mandating the re-interrogation of all refugees admitted since 2021 and halting lawful permanent residence applications nationwide. In the days following the shooting, the administration escalated these measures, issuing a cascade of executive actions that froze asylum decisions, restricted entry, and invoked national-security rhetoric to justify the most sweeping restructuring of the U.S. humanitarian system in decades. USCIS halted all asylum decisions, and the White House introduced additional restrictions on entry and processing under the banner of national security. Under these new orders, refugees who had already passed extensive vetting, including security checks, medical exams, interagency review, and USCIS adjudication, were suddenly told that their protection might be reassessed and possibly revoked.
This represents not only a continuation but an escalation of long standing efforts to narrow access to refugee protection, transforming what were once border-focused restrictions into sweeping attempts to reopen and potentially dismantle settled refugee claims. By invoking national-security threats to justify revisiting settled refugee cases, the administration is constructing a narrative in which refugees themselves become subjects of suspicion whose protection must be continually revalidated. This framing serves a broader political project: to normalize the idea that even legally recognized refugees can be made precarious, and to signal that humanitarian commitments are subordinate to shifting political priorities. These moves stand in stark contrast to the administration’s recent decision to limit its refugee resettlement numbers to just a small group of white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, an action presented as an urgent humanitarian response even as nearly all other refugee pathways remain frozen.
By invoking national-security threats to justify revisiting settled refugee cases, the administration is constructing a narrative in which refugees themselves become subjects of suspicion whose protection must be continually revalidated.
It marks a profound shift in how the United States interprets one of its core obligations under international law: the prohibition on refoulement, the principle that forbids returning a person to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. By turning refugee status from a durable legal commitment into a conditional category subject to political reinterpretation, the administration is testing the limits of what non-refoulement can withstand.
Non-Refoulement and the Framework of Criminalization
This practice of reopening settled protection claims is incompatible with the core legal principle that once a state grants refugee status, it assumes an ongoing, non-discretionary duty to protect. Non-refoulement is codified in the 1951 Refugee Convention, incorporated into U.S. law through the 1967 Protocol and the Refugee Act of 1980, and reinforced by the absolute prohibition on torture under the Convention Against Torture. And while the shift in US policy threatens refugees broadly, it carries uniquely grave implications for LGBTQI+ refugees who often flee regimes where criminalization is embedded in law.
Drawing on my work supporting LGBTQI+ people fleeing criminalization and state violence, and on arguments advanced in Rainbow Railroad’s intervention before the Supreme Court of Canada in the Safe Third Country Agreement appeal, the principle is clear: returning an LGBTQI+ person to a country where their identity is criminalized constitutes refoulement. Criminalization of LGBTQI+ identity or expression is itself a form of persecution, it licenses abuse, erodes access to justice, and marks LGBTQI+ people as acceptable targets of violence.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) affirms that laws criminalizing consensual same-sex intimacy or gender expression constitute a form of persecution in and of themselves. Courts have reached the same conclusion. The U.K. Supreme Court in HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon)held that requiring LGBTQI+ people to conceal their identity to avoid harm is in itself persecutory, while the Court of Justice of the European Union’s X, Y and Z, decision found that laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy creates a real risk of persecution and violates fundamental rights. The UN Human Rights Committee’s landmark decision in Toonen v. Australia found that sodomy laws violate fundamental rights by their mere existence, a view echoed by the European Court of Human Rights and in regional human-rights bodies from the Inter-American Court to the African Commission.
U.S. jurisprudence mirrors the international cases. In Matter of Toboso-Alfonso the Board of Immigration Appeals recognized sexual orientation as a basis for a “particular social group”. In Avendano-Hernandez v. Lynch, the Ninth Circuit held that a transgender woman who suffered police and military abuse in Mexico faced a clear probability of torture if returned. In Bringas-Rodriguez v. Sessions, the court rejected the notion that LGBTQI+ survivors of violence must first seek protection from authorities known to persecute them.These decisions affirm that criminalization and state-enabled violence meet the threshold that “life or freedom would be threatened.” There is no question that the United States has long recognized this standard, even as current policy drifts from it.
A Rescinding of refugee responsibilities
The re-vetting directive must also be understood within a broader trajectory of U.S. efforts to externalize asylum responsibilities. This pattern was visible in the first Trump Administration's border closures, summary removals, Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) , the Title 42 expulsion regime, the third-country transit ban, and the Asylum Cooperative Agreements. The current administration has accelerated these measures dramatically. In early 2025, it effectively shut down access to asylum at the southern border.The reinstated MPP returned individuals to border regions where they faced kidnapping, extortion, and cartel violence. The administration has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport individuals with pending asylum claims to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, despite its well-documented patterns of torture. In March and April 2025 alone 252 Venezuelans, including asylum seekers, were sent to CECOT. These cases illustrate a clear prioritization of enforcement over legal obligation, even when doing so exposes individuals to torture or harm.
At the multilateral level, the administration has attempted to recast global refugee rules as an unreasonable burden on wealthier states. Recent removals to Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda, and South Sudan, jurisdictions with weak protection capacity, demonstrate how third-country transfers have become tools of indirect refoulement.The November 2025 deportation of a man to Guatemala, carried out despite an immigration-court finding that he would likely face torture, shows that these risks extend well beyond the Africa expulsion agreements. All these actions reflect a broader effort to erode core non-refoulement obligations.
What the Re-Vetting Directive Means in Practice
The consequences of the December 2 USCIS directive are immediate and far-reaching. For many, the adjustment-of-status process has effectively become a second refugee adjudication, introducing the risk of termination or removal despite years of lawful residence. Reopening refugee cases destabilizes communities, disrupts integration, and leaves overseas families stranded after years of preparation for travel, not to mention re-traumatization inherent in re-interrogating individuals who have already demonstrated a well-founded fear of persecution. Afghan Evac, the national coalition coordinating support for Afghans evacuated in 2021, warns that the re-vetting process compounds an already “untenable state of legal uncertainty” for tens of thousands of Afghans who have been waiting years for pathways to permanency, noting that many Afghans parolees, SIV applicants, and refugees are now subject to duplicative scrutiny, risking termination or denial despite having already survived one of the most complex and intrusive vetting systems in U.S. history.
Reopening refugee cases destabilizes communities, disrupts integration, and re-traumatizes people who have already demonstrated a well-founded fear of persecution.
For LGBTQI+ refugees, the consequences are profound. The refugee interview is often the first time a person has disclosed their identity to a government official. That disclosure is shaped by trauma, shame, cultural context, and the survival strategies developed under criminalizing regimes. Asking individuals to reconstruct these narratives years later, under implied threat, does not produce clarity; it produces fear. Discrepancies that emerge from trauma may be interpreted as deception. A process designed to evaluate safety becomes a mechanism that risks undermining it.
I have sat with individuals who described the fear of entering a government building for a routine appointment, uncertain whether protection would be withdrawn. For individuals who believed that crossing into the protection system meant stepping out of precarity, the memo signals that this precarity can return at any time. During the fall of Afghanistan, I saw how quickly protection can collapse when states retreat from their obligations. LGBTQI+ Afghans who had spent years in hiding reached out in panic as the Taliban reimposed criminalization overnight. Many were evacuated through ad hoc, fragile pathways that depended on the willingness of states, including the United States, to honour their protection commitments. When the U.S. now signals that even granted refugee status can be reopened, it sends a message that safety is conditional, and that protection can be withdrawn just as quickly as it is offered.
When LGBTQI+ refugees risk termination, that risk is not abstract. Return may expose them to the very criminal penalties, police entrapment, and societal violence they fled. The United States cannot ignore the weight of this responsibility. Once a person has disclosed their identity in pursuit of protection, the resettlement state becomes custodian of that knowledge. Withdrawal of protection amplifies the danger.
The Credibility of the United States Is at Stake
The cumulative effect is clear: the United States is redefining refugee status as a conditional category rather than a durable protection grounded in law. The convergence of the asylum halt, the nationality-based suspensions, and the expanded re-vetting program marks a pivotal moment in U.S. refugee protection. What is at stake is more than the fate of LGBTQI+ refugees. It is the credibility of the United States as a rights-respecting democracy bound by its own laws and international commitments.
Protection, once granted, is a binding obligation rooted in non-refoulement. To comply with domestic and international law, the United States must rescind the re-vetting directive and restore the adjustment-of-status process for refugees already admitted, reaffirm the principle of non-refoulement, and end externalization practices that knowingly expose asylum seekers to torture, organized crime, or state violence.These steps are essential to preserving the integrity of the U.S. protection system and upholding the international legal commitments that define it.
If the United States allows refugee protection to become a revocable privilege rather than a binding obligation, it will not only violate its own laws, it will forfeit the trust refugees place in its promise of safety and erode its standing as a global defender of human rights.
Kimahli Powell, Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights
