The Trump Administration Approach to Refugee Protection Endangers Refugee Lives and Undermines the Rule of Law

At the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2025, President Trump shared the vision for border management and refugee protection that he and his administration are now trying to export to the rest of the world. His speech was riddled with fear-mongering rhetoric painting migrants and people seeking asylum as invaders, criminals, and threats to societies, as “people they have never seen before, with different customs, religions, with different everything.”  Telling world leaders that “[y]our countries are going to hell,” he offered his solution for people arriving at borders: “you’re going to jail or you’re going back to where you came from, or perhaps even further than that” – a clear reference to places like the notoriously abusive CECOT prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent immigrants and people seeking asylum.

Two days later, on Thursday afternoon, September 25, Trump administration officials laid out their plans for the global refugee protection system in a public meeting along the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Describing the Refugee Convention and Protocol as established in a “very different world,” Spencer Chretien, Senior Bureau Official for the U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), outlined the administration’s goal to develop and formalize changes to the international refugee protection and asylum systems by trying to build support for a set of “new principles.”

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