The Trump administration continues to cause disruption and upheaval in the US’ migrant and refugee sector.

Migrants and asylum seekers face losing jobs, work rights and access to their family members under the latest raft US immigration initiatives.

Work rights

Under the latest proposed administration rules asylum-seekers could effectively lose the right to work in the US.

Currently asylum-seekers must wait six months after filing an asylum request before they can work legally, but the Trump administration is seeking to extend that to one year.

The proposal would also pause any new requests for work rights during times of high asylum case processing backlogs. Since the backlog is now 1.4 million asylum cases, that would effectively stop new and renewal work request applications for anywhere between 14 and 170 years, local reports say.

Migrant advocacy group The Forum said the rule would “make it impossible for asylum-seekers to work legally to support themselves,” and would result in more poverty and off-the-books workers competing with legal workers for jobs.

At least half a million asylum cases would be affected immediately, if the rule takes effect, causing wage losses of  between $US27 billion and $US127 billion a year, according to the US Department of Homeland Security own estimates.

As well as new requests, renewals will also have to go through the same process and, even if they are even granted, would effectively be shorter based on another rule change that limits employment authorisation and renewals to 18 months instead of the previous limit of five years.

Analyst for the Washington nonpartisan think tank, the Migration Policy Institute, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh said: “This makes it harder for people to gain work authorisation and also more arduous to stay work-authorised”.

Families separated

More than one million US citizens could be separated from their spouses or children under Trump administration mass deportation policies, according to a new report backed by a group of Christian organisations.

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and its humanitarian agency World Relief have published a report estimating the impact that the Trump administration’s campaign promise to deport one million illegal immigrants per year will have on US citizen spouses and children of illegal immigrants.

Titled ‘Joined Together, Torn Apart: How U.S. Immigration Policies Are Separating Families’, the document forecasts the effects of halting all immigrant visas for 75 countries, predicting that up to 910,000 US citizen children could be separated from one or both parents by the end of Trump’s term, with 665,000 expected to be separated from both parents.

The report estimated the number of illegal immigrants affected by the administration’s policies by assuming it follows through on the president’s pledge, totalling four million deportations by the end of his term in early 2029.

Overseas green cards

The Trump administration has announced a new policy that requires most people seeking permanent residency in the US return to their home countries to apply, in what some observers have said is one of the biggest blows the administration as dealt to legal migration since returning to the White House.

The move means the spouses and relatives of US citizens, professionals and students already legally in the US will have to go abroad to apply for lawful permanent residency through US consulates unless they meet very narrow exceptions.

US consular processing of visas and green cards can take months or years to complete, and reports says this will separate families and force workers to leave their jobs.

ICE arrests

Thousands of asylum-seekers are abandoning their cases for refugee protection in the US as ICE seeks to deport them to nations they aren’t from.

Hundreds of asylum seekers have already been arrested when appearing at their immigration court hearings and deported.

A CBS News report says the administration’s moves to deport asylum-seekers to third countries have stalled thousands of immigrants’ cases and scared thousands more into giving up their asylum claims.

Migration Policy Institute analyst Ariel Ruiz Soto said third country deportations had more to do with “fear than scale”.

The NGO Refugees International has released a report that says about 17,500 people have been deported to third countries since President Trump returned to office, the vast majority to Mexico.

The report says far more have faced the threat of being deported to a third country. In a broad, months-long campaign, more than 75,500 asylum cases received a motion to “pretermit,” or terminate proceedings without a hearing on the merits.

Replacement theory

The US State Department has accused the United Nations of promoting what is calls ‘replacement immigration’ – a reference to a discredited far-right, white supremacist conspiracy theory that Western elites and Jewish co-conspirators are deliberately orchestrating mass migration and promoting multiculturalism to replace white populations with non-white immigrants.

In formally rejecting a United Nations migration declaration, the US State Department said the UN was pushing ‘replacement immigration’ in the US and across Europe – a phrase that has become politically and rhetorically charged in recent years.

It said Washington would not participate in the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) and would not support the “progress declaration” adopted at the meeting, held at UN headquarters in New York in May.

The language used in the State Department message represents a shift US diplomatic rhetoric.

South Africans

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has raised the cap for refugees entering the US, but only for white South Africans.

The administration has announced that it will admit an additional 10,000 white South Africans into the US as refugees this year.

Read more: Family Separation Report – World Relief