Exclusive: DHS based its newest refugee attack on a Trump proclamation that stated it would not apply to refugees

New documents filed in a key refugee case in Minnesota shed light on a broad, aggressive plan to review all refugees admitted since the start of the Biden administration.

The Department of Homeland Security is currently targeting 5,600 refugees in Minnesota as a first step in an expansive plan aimed at reviewing — and presumably restricting — the legal status of refugees admitted between January 20, 2021 and February 20, 2025.

One of its keys steps to doing so — reversing the government’s longtime position on whether a federal law allows the government to detain certain refugees — appears to based on nothing, at best, or a lie, at worst.

The information is coming out of litigation filed in the wake of the launch of Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), an “investigation” announced by DHS on January 9 that is targeting certain refugees in Minnesota to start.

As Law Dork reported on Wednesday, the Trump administration had suggested in federal court in Minnesota recently that it had rescinded 2010 guidance that barred detaining refugees who had not yet obtained lawful permanent resident status — a green card — after a year of being in the U.S. The guidance itself — as U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, a Clinton appointee, has made clear — wasn’t even new, as it echoed earlier views of the provision in the Refugee Act of 1980 — 8 U.S.C. 1159.

Nonetheless, in a January 31 declaration, Tauria Rich, the deputy director of the St. Paul Field Office of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), stated that the 2010 guidance had been rescinded by Marcos Charles, ERO’s Acting Executive Associate Director.

Tunheim ordered the rescission memo to be turned over by February 12. Although initially ordered to be submitted under seal, Law Dork is seeking to intervene in the case and one of Law Dork’s requests was to lift the sealing. Before ruling on the intervention request, on Thursday, Tunheim nonetheless lifted the sealing order, ordering instead that “[s]uch documents shall be filed but not under seal.“

As such, the government filed the documents — not under seal — on Thursday night. Although still not remotely accessible because Tunheim has not yet ruled on Law Dork’s intervention and requests, they are public court documents, so Law Dork is publishing them.

---

Here is the rescission memo:

To justify this rescission — which, again, is part of the government’s justification for rounding up and detaining thousands of law-abiding refugees in Minnesota alone — Charles wrote all of one paragraph.

In that paragraph, he cited only one source: A presidential proclamation from two days earlier.

Here’s the problem with that.

The word “refugee” only appears in the extensive proclamation twice — in a provision stating that the “proclamation shall not apply … to a refugee who has already been admitted to the United States.“

The only time the presidential proclamation cited to justify rounding up refugees mentions refugees is to say the proclamation will have no effect on refugees.

That’s not all.

DOJ also filed the November 21 memo from Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, laying out the extraordinarily broad and oppressive plans to target all refugees admitted between Day One of the Biden administration and the second month of the second Trump administration.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association posted a “practice alert” about this memo on January 9 in conjunction with the launch of Operation PARRIS, noting that the organization had “review[ed]” the memo but adding that “the guidance has not been published by USCIS.“

Law Dork is publishing it now.

USCIS issued a plan to hold all refugees’ applications for lawful permanent resident (LPR) status and review and “potential[ly] re-interview” every refugee admitted since January 20, 2021.

So, as of November 21, DHS held all LPR applications, then, on January 9, began rounding up and detaining all refugees who had not yet obtained LPR status.

Further, this is intended to get much larger.

The key paragraph — and footnotes — from Edlow’s memo makes clear that the effort is intended to go nationwide and “includes refugees who have already adjusted and are a Lawful Permanent Resident.“

Correct. Even having LPR status is not sufficient to escape USCIS’s “reinterview” plan.

Finally, DOJ filed a third memo lifting a hold on benefits adjudication for certain people who get through Operation PARRIS’s vetting process.

Of course, all of this is just the plan.

Tunheim already has blocked the detention effort and rejected DOJ’s request to dissolve the temporary restraining order currently in place.

That lawsuit and other litigation is challenging or will challenge many aspects of this plan.