U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the East Room at the White House Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025, in Washington (Carl Court/Pool Photo via AP).
A federal judge in Seattle has barred the Trump administration from attempting to “dismantle” the country’s refugee resettlement system.
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a Joe Biden appointee, issued a bench ruling in favor of a preliminary injunction. On Friday, the court issued a 62-page order formalizing that opinion.
Under the terms of Executive Order 14163, President Donald Trump aimed to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 90-day intervals “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.” The plaintiffs, in their lawsuit, said the 45th and 47th president’s executive order counsels a stark violation of federal law. The judge agreed.
“[T]hough the Executive enjoys considerable latitude to suspend refugee admissions, that discretion is not boundless,” Whitehead wrote. “Where, as here, Presidential action effectively nullifies a congressionally established program, causing irreparable harm to vulnerable individuals and organizations, judicial intervention becomes necessary to preserve the separation of powers our Constitution demands.”
Led by a Congolese refugee identified only with the pseudonym Pacito, the lawsuit said the major problem with the refugee ban is that it violates the 1980 Refugee Act — part of the broader Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). This federal law “sets out detailed policies and procedures” that make up the USRAP, according to the lawsuit. And portions of this law are “statutorily mandated,” the plaintiffs said.
The plaintiffs also alleged two additional fatal flaws with the would-be sea change in the refugee system: they violate the notice-and-comment procedures which govern all administrative agencies and are arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.
“On all three fronts, the Court agrees that Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits,” the court observed.
The majority of the analysis, however, concerns the USRAP issues.
One aspect of the USRAP relevant to many plaintiffs is the statutory provision known as “follow to join” or “following to join” (FTJ), and which allows refugees already in the country to petition for their spouses and minor children to join them — subject to two conditions.
Here, the court sided with the plaintiffs in no uncertain terms.
“Plaintiffs contend that suspending USRAP violates the due process rights of follow-to-join petitioners, including Plaintiff Esther,” the court’s order read. “The Defendants counter that this ‘procedural due process claim’ lacks merit.”
Whitehead goes on to explain that the government, in support of the ban, cited a Supreme Court case that dealt with a U.S. national trying to get their non-citizen spouse into the country based on the Fifth Amendment. This was the wrong case to cite, the judge said.
“Esther’s interest stems not from constitutional implications but from a specific statutory entitlement,” the court’s order read. “Under [the FTJ statute], spouses and children of refugees ‘shall be entitled to the same admission status’ when following to join the principal refugee,” the court order read. “This mandatory language establishes a substantive right, not a discretionary privilege.”
The judge explained how the FTJ law is viewed in the circuit, at length:
Ninth Circuit precedent recognizes that procedural due process protections attach to liberty interests grounded in “non-constitutional law, such as a statute.” The mandatory language in [the FTJ statute] creates precisely such an interest—an entitlement for refugees’ eligible family members to receive the same refugee status, which in turn gives rise to procedural protections before that entitlement can be suspended.
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“Plaintiff Esther’s interest in her daughter’s admission is substantial,” the judge continued. “After eight years of pursuing her petition, when her daughter was finally ‘on the verge of travel,’ Esther learned, with no prior notice or opportunity to be heard, that her daughter’s admission was indefinitely suspended. And given the Court’s conclusion that the Executive Order is itself likely unlawful, the government’s interests cannot justify this procedural deficiency. The government has no legitimate interest in enforcing an order that exceeds its statutory authority.”
The refugee resettlement process, or USRAP, is complicated, contains multiple steps, and often requires input from — and substantial work performed by — both public and private entities.
This fact of the refugee system implicates the Trump administration’s refugee funding suspension. A separate group of non-refugee plaintiffs – three Jewish, ecumenical Christian, and Lutheran refugee resettlement organizations – arguing the highly-litigated foreign aid pause “has nothing to do with refugee resettlement” and does not mention refugees or refugee support benefits whatsoever.
Additionally, the original petition said the spending freeze was unlawfully backdated by several months – resulting in a lack of “reimbursements for millions of dollars they are owed from the State Department for work performed in November and December 2024, well before the Suspension Notices and the Foreign Aid Executive Order issued.”
Again, the judge agreed with the plaintiffs.
In this case, the court said, the violation here is more egregious because the heads of the defendant agencies have even less discretion than the president under the law governing refugees.
“By withholding funding, the Agency Defendants likely act contrary to law not only by abdicating their own obligations to fund and administer the program but also by prohibiting resettlement partners from complying with their statutory obligations,” the court stated. “And given that neither the USRAP EO nor the Foreign Aid EO call for the defunding of the domestic refugee resettlement program, the Court is not inclined the credit the ostensibly temporary nature of those Orders as a factor weighing against the illegality of the Refugee Funding Suspension.”
The cumulative effect of the government’s action is that the plaintiffs have suffered numerous harms – and are likely to continue to suffer them.
“The public interest is not served by maintaining executive actions that conflict with federal law, particularly where those actions threaten to dismantle a refugee resettlement infrastructure built over decades to carry out Congress’s expressed commitment to humanitarian protection,” Whitehead mused.
The court issued a nationwide injunction that will remain in effect until the case concludes at the district court level or unless the governments seeks and is granted a stay pending appeal.
