Legal challenge to EO burdening state refugee resettlement

There is hope for refugees in the new year! According to Joanthan Blitzer’s article in the New Yorker, the White House is Trying and Failing to to Keep States from Resettling Refugees.

State involvement in refugee resettlement is nothing new, but the White House’s attempts to meddle took on a new dimension with an executively that was first tucked into the first travel ban and that reappeared in September 2019 in a separate issuance following the rescission of travel ban 1.

On January 8, 2020 a federal judge will hear a legal challenge to the executive order brought by the International Refugee Assistance Project. As Blitzer reports, “Congress has set out a statute for how the President can make the decision on resettling refugees,” Melissa Keaney, a lawyer with the group, told me. According to her, the executive order violates the statute by granting local governments the ultimate say. “It’s ironic that the Administration is saying it wants to give this power to the states,” she said. “The President has repeatedly defended his immigration actions by saying that the issue is solely the province of the executive.”

The terrain of refugee resettlement has changed with Trump Administration restrictions that stalled admissions and set an unprecedently low level for the coming year (18,ooo). For more scholarly perspective on the role of states in refugee resettlement – an understudied topic in immigration federalism – see Stella Elias Burch’s 2017 article and research from Megan Ballard at Gonzaga University.

MHC