06/20/2026
Between 1933 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were turned away from countries where they sought refuge. Many of these people lost their lives during the Holocaust. In 1951, the world came together in Geneva and created the Refugee Convention. In 1967, the world came together again and adopted the 1967 Protocol, which was signed by the United States on 1 November 1968. In doing so, we made a promise that what had happened would never happen again.
I wish that was the end of the story, but it is happening again. On 20 January 2025, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was suspended. This means that refugees that otherwise would have been resettled in the United States, despite being subject to intensive vetting processes, are not being allowed to come to the United States and are forced to remain in the countries that they fled to.
That same day, entries to the United States were suspended for those seeking asylum. People who are granted asylum meet the legal definition of refugee - people who are unwilling or unable to return to their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. The difference is whether the person is inside or outside of the United States at the time of this determination.
While I have been heartbroken about what is happening, I have poured my energy into helping those I can. This means filing petitions for the family members of people who came here as refugees, applying for naturalization, permanent residence, employment authorization, and other immigration benefits. In June 2025, a travel ban was put into effect that suspended or limited entry for people from 19 countries. This travel ban contained an exception for “Immediate Relatives” of U.S. citizens (in terms of immigration law, this means the spouses, children under age 21 and parents of U.S. citizens).
On 16 December 2025, the travel ban was modified and expanded to include 39 countries. This new ban, which went into effect on 1 January 2026, took away the exception for Immediate Relatives. Because my clients are primarily from Africa and the Middle East, an overwhelming majority of my clients are affected by the ban. This means not only that people, who have been doing everything legally, in every sense of the word, are going to be kept from their loved ones, based solely off where they happened to have been born, but that people’s lives will be placed at risk. Included on the list are people from Sudan, which our government knows is experiencing genocide. We are once again turning our backs to the people facing genocide. South Sudan is on this list despite growing instability threatening lives there. Somalia is on this list even though, for 35 years, we have recognized that the situation there is too dangerous to send people back to. Palestinians are also on this list. The lesson of the Holocaust isn’t just that we should protect Jewish people. It is that we should protect ALL people.
From 1 January 2026 to 5 June 2026, USCIS had a hold on all applications for anyone from the 39 countries listed in the 16 December 2025 travel ban and all asylum applications pending with USCIS (despite an out-of-control backlog). That policy memorandum also announced a “re-review” of approved benefit requests for anyone who entered on or after 20 January 2021. These decisions were framed as a measure to protect national security, but this is a smokescreen. There are rigorous security protocols in place to prevent the admission of anyone that would threaten the security of the United States. People have to wait for years while they wait for extensive security screening to be conducted by various agencies, including the FBI, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center. This screening is absolutely exhaustive.
More specifically, the government pointed to the shooting of the two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C. as justification for its decisions to stop adjudicating immigration benefits and ban travel for people from 19 and then 39 countries. In addition to these harms, the government used this to try to justify undoing past grants of immigration benefits. It makes no sense to ban everyone from 39 countries based on the actions of one individual. You can’t hold entire populations responsible for the acts of one person. In any given population there are good people and bad people (or people who do good things and people who do bad things) and people that fall somewhere in between.
On 21 January 2026, the Department of State issued a ban on the issuance of immigrant visas for people from 75 countries. This ban is also based in pretense. The Department of State attempts to justify this ban by saying that people from these 75 countries receive public assistance too often, ignoring the fact that people who come to the U.S. with immigrant visas (unless subject to limited exception) have to have one or more legally binding contracts wherein a sponsor has agreed to support them financially in the event that they are unable to do so. In the event that the sponsor fails to do provide this support, the government will sue to the sponsor to recover any funds it has had to spend on the immigrant. Here in Arizona (and this is the case in the overwhelming majority of states), people who arrive with immigrant visas aren’t even eligible to obtain public assistance for at least 5 years. Between the 39 and 75 country bans, there are now 92 countries are now affected by bans and restrictions.
While the USCIS hold policies have been vacated by court order, the travel bans are still in effect on the Department of State side of the process. Because of these bans, a door has been slammed in the face of the overwhelming majority of my clients. These are people who have, since the onset, been doing everything “legally” (I put that in quotes, because the reality of immigration law is not that simple, but there is not even an argument to be made in these cases). They are people who have been waiting for years to be reunited with their husbands, wives and young children. This door, which is supposed to be a golden door with a lamp lifted beside it, has been slammed in my clients’ faces based solely upon where they happened to have been born.
You may not know people from Sudan or South Sudan or Eritrea or Somalia, but I do. I work every day with people from these countries and many others on the list. Because of my experiences, I know how illogical this is.
As someone who works every day with refugees and immigrants, I feel very frustrated about the rhetoric that I am seeing. I find myself asking how people could have so little empathy for other human beings, but I realized that algorithms are exposing us to two diametrically opposed interpretations of the world. People being exposed to one version of “reality” might be scared, because they are being told that immigrants are murderers and rapists, and they believe that this is true. Maybe these people believe that, because they haven’t had the experiences that I have. I talk to immigrants and refugees every day. I have been invited into my clients’ homes and have the privilege of knowing them. I have gotten to share in some of the best memories in their lives and been with them as they have had to relive some of the worst. It’s made me wish that I could share what I know about this population with other people, because I LOVE my clients, and I know that if you knew them, you would love them too (or at least understand that there is nothing to fear).
My clients are a grandmother that gives you too much food even though you tried to say no, a child that just wanted to get back to his mother, young men that volunteer countless hours of their time to help elders, young mothers who have had to flee from war zones carrying their babies and toddlers, entrepreneurs who have created numerous jobs for others in the communities where they were resettled, people orphaned by war who went on to do amazing things, a school bus driver that I am sure is all the kids’ favorite, caregivers that work two or three jobs to take care of their families, people who would give you the shirt off their back, the kind of person that brightens everyone’s day through infectious joy, doctors who have risked their lives to save others’, restaurant owners that make the most delicious food, heroes who have put their lives on the line through service in the U.S. military , people who will make you laugh so hard that you can’t remember what you were supposed to be doing… these are just a few illustrations of the types of people that are being harmed by these policies.
Maybe my clients don’t have the same color skin or cook the same foods that you do or pray the same way that you do, but they love their children like you do, they feel pain like you do, they have dreams like you do…
The bans and holds mentioned herein are just a few examples of the policies now undermining our legal immigration system.
