Trump administration plans push at UN to restrict global asylum rights

State Department officials sketched out plans for an event later this month on the sidelines of the U.N.'s annual general assembly meeting that would call for reframing the global approach to asylum and immigration to reflect Trump's restrictive stance, according to two internal planning documents reviewed by Reuters and a State Department spokesperson.

Under the proposed framework, asylum seekers would be required to claim protection in the first country they enter, not a nation of their choosing, the spokesperson said. Asylum would be temporary and the host country would decide whether conditions in their home country had improved enough to return, a major shift from how asylum works in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Trump's administration has already rewritten the U.S. approach to immigration, prioritizing white South Africans for entry and forcefully detaining those in the country illegally. With the U.N. event, Trump would be taking that restrictive vision global, urging its adoption by the world body that established the international legal framework for the right to seek asylum.

One of the documents describes migration as "a defining challenge for the world in the 21st century" and says asylum "is routinely abused to enable economic migration." It calls for reforming the global approach to migration worldwide and greatly limiting the ability of people to seek asylum.

Mark Hetfield, president of the refugee resettlement group HIAS, defended the existing global agreements as ensuring people would never be subject to persecution without an escape route.

"Right now, if someone comes to the border of any country because they are fleeing for their lives on the basis of race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion, they have the right to protection," Hetfield said. "If it were to change, we'd be back to the situation we were in during the Holocaust."

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau would lead the side event at the U.N., according to the planning document.

In a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, Andrew Veprek, Trump's nominee to run the State Department's refugee division, called for reshaping the global approach to asylum.

"Perhaps the most important root cause of the mass and illegal migration today is the abuse of refugee and asylum systems," Veprek said. "The current framework of international agreements and norms on migration developed after the Second World War in a completely different geopolitical and economic context. It cannot be expected to function in our modern world, and indeed it does not."

SHIFT IN THE U.S. APPROACH TO MIGRATION

Adoption of the plan would mark a stunning shift in the global order for migration, going beyond Trump's hardline approach in his 2017-2021 presidency.

Global compacts signed by most of the world's countries in 1951 and 1967 established a framework for someone fleeing persecution to seek asylum at another country's borders. The U.S. and other nations in recent years have begun to adopt more restrictive stances.

The U.S. could not unilaterally scrap the global refugee pacts, however, and while some like-minded governments may support the effort, there have been no signs of broad support for a worldwide realignment.

At a meeting of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration on Tuesday, top Trump refugee official Spencer Chretien said the Trump administration would seek to replace the decades-old global accords and "build a new framework," according to meeting notes shared with Reuters.

Bureau staff were told the group itself, already gutted as part of mass layoffs at the State Department in July, would refocus on migration diplomacy and disaster response rather than its traditional refugee focus.

Chretien said the top goal for the bureau - set by the highest levels of the White House - would be resettling white South Africans from the country's Dutch-descended Afrikaner minority.

"This is our overriding objective," Chretien said, according to the notes. "And frankly, we're under a good amount of pressure to ramp up the pace of this program and produce arrivals quickly."

Trump froze refugee admissions from countries around the world when he took office in January, but weeks later called for Afrikaners to be prioritized. The first group of 59 South Africans arrived in May. As of Monday, 138 in total had arrived, one U.S. official said, requesting anonymity to discuss internal figures.

Reuters reported in August that Trump officials were discussing setting a refugee admission ceiling of 40,000 people in fiscal year 2026 with a heavy focus on Afrikaners. The administration has since discussed a ceiling as high as 60,000, the U.S. official said.

An internal document drafted by officials in the State Department and U.S. Health and Human Services Department in April suggested the Trump administration could also prioritize bringing in Europeans as refugees if they were targeted for expressing certain views, such as opposition to mass migration or support for populist political parties.