President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a meeting with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 21, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders November 25, 2025 at 3:45pm
President Donald Trump’s efforts to clean up the Biden administration’s porous policies for admission to the United States are moving beyond roundups of illegal aliens.
According to news reports, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services plans to review the cases of more than 200,000 individuals who entered the country during former President Joe Biden’s tenure to ensure that those granted refugee status actually deserved refugee status.
It’s a move Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, called necessary to deal with the “reckless” decisions of the Biden years.
“For four straight years, the Biden administration accelerated refugee admissions from terror and gang-prone countries, prioritizing sheer numbers over rigorous vetting and strict adherence to legal requirements,” McLaughlin said in a statement, according to NBC News.
The initiative was first reported by Reuters, citing a memo it had seen that was signed by Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joe Edlow.
It was then picked up by numerous news agencies, including the Associated Press.
If the memo was leaked to stoke yet more feelings against the Trump White House, it certainly succeeded.
Numerous news reports cited refugee advocacy groups slamming the decision.
“Refugees admitted under the U.S. refugee resettlement program have undergone some of the most rigorous vetting of any immigrant lawfully admitted into the United States, yet this sweeping re-interview initiative is nothing less than a calculated effort to strip lawful status from thoroughly-vetted, law-abiding people,” Myal Greene, president of World Relief, said in a statement, according to The Hill.
Greene specifically complained that it comes when the Trump administration has limited the number of refugees the U.S. will accept to 7,500 per year, with a majority of those slots, according to NBC News, allocated to white citizens fleeing South Africa.
“It is a moral and ethical betrayal of due process at a time when the Trump administration is attempting to lower the standard for refugee admissions to include Afrikaners and others who do not meet the legal standard of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ that past refugees have been required to meet,” she said in the statement.
The refugee review is different from Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions that have targeted illegal aliens in major U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, many of them among the millions who crossed the southern border illegally during the Biden years.
According to the Citizenship and Immigration Services website, those granted legal refugee status in the U.S. must have demonstrated they were “persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.”
But according to parts of the memo cited in news accounts, Edlow wrote that the Biden administration had not been diligent in reviewing potential refugees.
The Biden administration accepted 233,000 “refugees” in its four years, according to Reuters. Just under half of those, about 100,000, were admitted in the 2024 fiscal year that ended just before the November election returned Trump to the White House, Reuters reported.
In his memo, Edlow wrote that “expediency” and “quantity” had a priority over “detailed screening and vetting,” according to the Associated Press.
In her own statement, McLaughlin wrote that the Biden administration’s carelessness made the current reviews necessary.
“This reckless approach undermined the integrity of our immigration system and jeopardized the safety and security of the American people,” her statement said, according to NBC News.
“Corrective action is now being taken to ensure those who are present in the United States deserve to be here.”
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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