In 1939, the United States government turned away the M.S. St. Louis and more than 900 desperate Jewish refugees aboard the ship, sending them back to their fates in Europe. Hundreds of rejected passengers were murdered by the Nazis.
America was not alone in its shame for denying safe harbor to refugees from Nazism and fascism during World War II.
The land of the free is now admitting refugees based on the whimsical political favor of the president, as opposed to the severity of their personal circumstances.
Thus, following the Allied victory and the world’s reckoning with the horrors of the war and the Holocaust, the free nations came together and created an international framework for the treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum from oppressive governments. Here in America, we redeemed the visionary promise Tom Paine had made when he said America would become “an asylum to humanity.”
But now our decades-old program for the admission and resettlement of refugees to America has ground to a halt under President Donald Trump. One of his first orders in office was a 90-day pause on the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program — a three-month pause that is still going strong eight months later.
The results of this interruption have been shocking. Nearly 130,000 people who were found to have a credible fear of persecution in their homelands — and have also met the rigorous vetting requirements of our refugee program — have been left waiting endlessly to be admitted.
After proving to our government that their lives, families and livelihoods would be in danger if they were forced to return to their authoritarian societies — everywhere from Afghanistan to China to Russia to Saudi Arabia to Venezuela — they were given the promise of safety and a new life in America. Only now, that promise has been cruelly snatched away. They hang in limbo because they have been granted refugee status — but given no opportunity to enter the country.
More than 12,000 of the approved refugees already had flights to America booked in the weeks following President Trump’s inauguration but were told by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and the Trump administration that they were no longer welcome, so long as the MAGA “pause” was in effect.
But there is clearly room at the inn. While these fully vetted and approved Americans-in-waiting languish in depressing and often dangerous refugee camps around the world, President Trump has warmly invited planeloads of Afrikaners, white South African farmers, to skip the line entirely and come to America overnight as “refugees” — even as the ban on other lawfully designated and demonstrably imperiled refugees remains in effect.
The land of the free is now admitting refugees based on the whimsical political favor of the president, as opposed to the severity of their personal circumstances. The administration is also breaking the law to mask these ugly facts. Under the law, by Sept. 30, the administration must consult with Congress about the number and types of refugees it plans to admit during the next year. But Sept. 30 came and went, and no consultation has even been scheduled. All signs suggest that the administration will continue to welcome Afrikaners, upending the essential principles of the refugee program, while keeping tens of thousands of lawfully designated refugees trapped abroad — where they face serious ongoing threats of persecution and violence. These policies are not only a profound hardship and danger for refugee families. They are a loss for all Americans. Refugees — people like Albert Einstein, Madeleine Albright, Gloria Estefan, Sergey Brin and Jan Koum — make America stronger, more creative and more prosperous. Refugees help communities thrive as their economic contributions far outweigh minimal government expenditures on initial resettlement and integration. The chaos injected by the Trump administration into refugee admissions and resettlement has painful and deadly consequences. Refugees awaiting permanent resettlement have been attacked and even killed as they pray for our government to cut the red tape. Stephen Miller cannot be allowed to nullify and rewrite federal law and consign our admitted and desperate refugees to a grim fate all over the world. Now is the time to act to resume America’s critical refugee program.
Rep. Jamie Raskin
Jamie Raskin represents Maryland's 8th congressional district in the House of Representatives. 
