Category: Refugees
Senate bill would give nearly $6 billion to refugee programs despite record-low intake numbers
An appropriations bill could allocate billions in funding to refugee programs after temporary government funding expires.
Congress passed a clean funding extension in November 2025 that expires on January 30, 2026, when new funding allocation could take place.
‘These programs provide a variety of benefits and services to refugees, asylees, Cuban and Haitian entrants.’
This possibility has conservatives pointing out issues with legislation like a Senate appropriations bill, first proposed in July, for fiscal year 2026.
The bill, which allocates funding for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and “related agencies,” has garnered significant attention from online researchers regarding its allocation of funds to refugee programs.
“Hey guys, all those insane ‘refugee assistance’ grants I’m always tweeting? The [GOP] is about to supercharge the funds,” wrote Oilfield Rando, an X account with more than 235,000 followers.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Particularly, conservatives online have taken issue with the bill’s recommendations for “Refugee and Entrant Assistance,” for which the committee recommends $5.691 billion.
“These programs provide a variety of benefits and services to refugees, asylees, Cuban and Haitian entrants, immigrants arriving on Special Immigrant Visas [SIV], trafficking victims, and torture victims,” the bill reads.
A whopping $564 million of those funds is recommended for “Transitional and Medical Services,” while providing grants to states and “nonprofit organizations to provide cash and medical assistance to arriving refugees, as well as foster care services to unaccompanied minors.”
More than $300 million is recommended for “Refugee Support Services.”
The Senate committee argued in the document that HHS needs to ensure funding for resettlement agencies so that they can maintain their infrastructure and capacity at a level to continue to serve “new refugees, previously arrived refugees,” and others who are eligible for “integration services.”
Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
According to the Baker Institute, the Trump administration set the refugee cap at 7,500 for fiscal year 2026, the lowest in U.S. history. This is reportedly a 94% reduction from the 125,000 cap that the Biden administration set for FY 2025.
President Trump famously admitted 59 South African refugees into the United States in May; however, there have been no other major intakes by the administration over the course of 2025.
The Senate Committee on Appropriations is majority Republican, with 15 Republicans and 14 Democrats.
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Settling Afghans here puts America last
I have a longtime friend — I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent — who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans who allegedly helped us from Afghanistan and resettlement of them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.
I have several strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.
‘The second the US military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.’
Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.
Joe Kent, an Afghanistan combat veteran and director of the National Counterterrorism Center, argued on social media for the deportation of all of our “Afghan allies.”
“Vetting a foreigner in a war zone to determine if he will fight a common enemy is vastly different than vetting a foreigner to see if he is suitable to live in our country,” Kent wrote.
As journalist Daniel Greenfield notes, the targeted attack on two National Guardsmen by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving was not a one-off. It’s part of an extensive series of assaults by Afghans whom we have foolishly allowed to resettle in the United States.
Unbridgeable inequalities
Having lived briefly in a third-world country and having traveled for many years in various countries of that description, I have quickly learned to be wary of “friendships.” It is not that people in these countries are inherently bad or incapable of genuine friendship in principle. It is that the gap between you (a well-off American) and them (a third-world citizen who, even if relatively affluent, is often at a huge disadvantage versus an American) is astronomical.
And that gap is not just financial and legal, but also based on traditions and customs. Relationships that may feel like genuine friendship for a time usually come with future requests or pleas for assistance. Again, I don’t necessarily blame these people — I might do the same in their shoes — and of course genuine friendships in such situations are possible, but they are far rarer than idealists might wish them to be.
What applies in basically peaceful third-world countries applies a thousandfold in an impoverished, war-torn, and primitive country like Afghanistan. It is monstrously arrogant to think the American political class understands deeply the inner workings of these countries and the motivations of the people there, given that we spent almost $1 trillion to occupy Afghanistan, only to see all of our efforts collapse within a week after we removed our military as a threat of force.
Wade Miller, the executive director of Citizens for Renewing America and a U.S. Marine combat veteran, responded to the claim that resettling Afghans was the moral thing to do since they “fought alongside our own” soldiers, rightly calling it a “BS metric.” As he noted, “1. Many played both sides. 2. Many only did it to make money. 3. Many were plants. 4. Many had long-standing tribal grudges against the Taliban.”
And none of them necessarily has a long-term loyalty to America, which is the first step to assess before even beginning to consider a claim of residency.
All of this would be obvious to anyone who does not let suicidal empathy overwhelm good sense. But unfortunately, we have lost that common sense, even among many of our supposedly hardened fighting forces.
‘We don’t owe them’
Miller punctures the lie that we owe these Afghans for “doing America a favor,” pointing out that we did them a favor by expending American lives and treasure to help them govern themselves without the Taliban. But “the second the U.S. military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.”
This is a harsh assessment, but in the aggregate, it is not unfair.
Or consider what Mark Lucas, an Afghanistan veteran and founder of the Article III Project, has written: “Afghans were untrustworthy allies who sold their children to pedophiles, ritually raped little boys, and beat their women.” He notes that without male soldiers guarding them, countless local Afghans made clear that they would have raped the women who were attached to their detachment.
RELATED: Trump makes America dangerous again — to our enemies
Jim Watson/Getty Images
Lucas points out that even asking simple questions of potential Afghan asylum-seekers, such as whether they support putting apostates to death, child marriage, Sharia for non-Muslims, defense of suicide bombings, polygamy, and honor killings, would quickly disqualify them. The vast majority of Afghans, he says, support one or more of these views — none of which are compatible with the American way of life.
One of the few Afghan refugees who resettled in my own state of Montana promptly raped a Montanan shortly after his arrival. Unsurprisingly, the crime and its implications were shamefully underreported by local media.
Toward a more sober policy
Even assuming we have an obligation to those we believed helped us in Afghanistan, it would mean we were obligated to get them to safety — not get them to America. If we had made it clear at the outset that relocating to America was not on offer, we would have see a drastic reduction in the number of “refugees.” We can and should resettle them in other countries. Making arrangements to do that is a worthy use of American soft power.
The notion that resettling Afghans in America is a moral duty reflects Joe Biden’s poor political leadership. His administration and previous ones before it had become arrogant about their ability to control events and remake complex societies and peoples far different from our own. In reality, their policies promoted cultural arrogance under the guise of friendship. They abandoned our own in favor of those from distant cultures and lands.
Let us hope that President Trump’s promise to refuse all new Afghan visas and to remove postwar arrivals and resettle them elsewhere is the start of a more sober, realistic, and serious refugee policy that will put the interests of America and its citizens first.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.
