The Trump administration has decreed that just 7,500 refugees will be allowed to enter the US during the 2026 Fiscal Year.

This represents a 94 per cent decrease from former President Joe Biden’s refugee target; a drop so steep from previous decades that humanitarian advocates say it effectively eliminates the refugee program.

The decree also said refugee admissions would “primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa,” along with “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

The Refugee Act of 1980 set up to 50,000 refugee admissions as a cap for that period, allowing the president, in consultation with Congress, discretion to raise the number for humanitarian reasons.

One goal of the Act was to make sure Presidents didn’t admit too many refugees.

The consultations the White House was supposed to have with Congress over the new cap didn’t happen, which the Trump administration said was due to the shutdown that ended last week.

The new cap is a radical decline from the figures of 125,500 refugees set under the Biden administration for fiscal 2025.

But it is also more than current refugee admissions, which have been all but shut down since President Trump signed an executive order in January shortly after he took office for his second term.

“No president other than Trump has set the ceiling below 60,000 in the 45-year history of the program,” Erol Kekic, senior vice president of Church World Service, a refugee resettlement group, told US media.

The content of the order itself could also be subject to challenge, with refugee advocates arguing it unfairly weighs race rather than the dangerous conditions refugees face in their home countries. 

Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments in September over a lawsuit filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project that argues the abrupt termination in January was unlawful.

The court may soon rule against the executive order on the basis that it violated laws providing for the admission of refugees as well as the Fifth Amendment.

Also, the Trump administration has called for a sharp narrowing of the right to asylum at the United Nations, as it seeks to undo the post-World War II framework around humanitarian protection.

State Department officials have sketched out plans that would call for reframing the global approach to asylum and immigration to reflect Trump’s restrictive stance, reports in the US says.

Under the proposed framework, asylum seekers would be required to claim protection in the first country they enter, not a nation of their choosing.

Asylum would be temporary, and the host country would decide whether conditions in their home country had improved enough to return, a major shift from how asylum currently works in the US.