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WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s administration is calling for a sharp narrowing of asylum rights at the UN later this month, as the document is trying to revoke two post-World War II frameworks on humanitarian protection, documents show.
According to two internal planning documents reviewed by Reuters and a State Department spokesman, State Department officials sketched out plans for an event that would shun the bystanders of the UN’s annual meeting later this month and call for reshaping a global approach to asylum and immigration to reflect Trump’s restrictive stance.
Under the proposed framework, asylum seekers should request protection in the first country they enter, not in the country they have chosen, the spokesman said. Asylum is temporary and the host country decides whether the conditions in the home country have improved enough to return. This is a major shift from the workings of asylum in the United States and elsewhere.
Trump’s administration has already rewritten the US approach to immigration, prioritizing entry to white South Africans and illegally forcing people around the country to detain people. The UN events will make Trump global in its restrictive vision and encourage adoption by global organisations that have established an international legal framework for the right to seek asylum.
One of the documents describes migration as “the crucial challenge of the world of the 21st century,” and states that asylum is “a routinely abused to enable economic migration.” It calls for reforming global approaches to migration around the world and significantly limiting people’s ability to seek asylum.
Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, the refugee resettlement group, defended the existing global agreement, ensuring that people would not be subject to persecution without a route of escape.
“Now, if someone comes to any border of the country because someone is running away for life based on race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion, they have a right to protection,” Hetfield said. “If that changes, we’ll go back to the situation we were during the Holocaust.”
Deputy Chief Secretary Christopher Landau will lead the side event at the UN, according to the planning documents.
During a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, Andrew Vepleck, the Trump candidate who runs the State Department’s Refugee Division, called for a restructuring of his global approach to asylum.
“Perhaps the most important and fundamental cause of today’s masses and illegal migration is the abuse of the refugees and asylum system,” Veprek said. “The current framework of international agreements and norms of migration developed in a completely different geopolitical and economic context after World War II. It cannot be expected to function in the modern world, and in reality it is not.”
The shift in the US approach to migration
The adoption of the plan will mark an astonishing change in the global order of migration, beyond Trump’s hard-pressed approach in the 2017-2021 presidency.
Signed by most countries around the world in 1951 and 1967, the Global Compact established a framework for those who fled persecution to seek asylum at the borders of other countries. In recent years, the US and other countries have begun to adopt a more restrictive stance.
However, while the United States could not unilaterally scrap the global refugee agreement, several like-minded governments may support the effort, there was no indication of widespread support for the global reorganization.
At a meeting of the State Department’s Population, Refugee and Immigration Bureau, Trump refugee official Spencer Kretchien said the Trump administration is hoping to “build a new framework” with global peers from decades ago, according to a memo from the conference shared with Reuters.
Bureau staff were told that the group itself, already hampered as part of a massive layoff at the State Department in July, will refocus on migration diplomacy and disaster response rather than traditional refugee focus.
Kretsyen said the main goal of the department, set by the White House’s highest level, is to resettle white South Africans from the Dutch African minority.
“This is our number one priority,” Chretien said, according to the memo. “And frankly, we are under great pressure to speed up this program and produce the arrivals soon.”
When Trump took office in January, he frozen hospitalizations for refugees from countries around the world, but weeks later, Africans called for prioritization. The first group of 59 South Africans arrived in May. As of Monday, a total of 138 people had arrived, one official said they were requesting anonymity to discuss internal figures.
Reuters reported in August that Trump officials were discussing the 2026 focus on Africans and setting an entry ceiling for 40,000 refugees. The administration subsequently discussed 60,000 ceilings, US officials said.
Internal documents, drafted in April by officials from the State Department and the US Health and Human Services, suggested that the Trump administration could also prioritize introducing Europeans as refugees if it aims to express certain views such as large-scale migration and support for populist parties.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson and Jonathan Landai, Additional Report by Humeyra Pamuk, Edited by Edmund Klamann)
