On a brisk morning this past fall, I took a taxi up the sloped roads of a densely populated neighborhood in the eastern part of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The neighborhood, called Jabal al-Joufeh, was historically home to merchants, politicians, and poets. More recently, it has become an informal settlement for refugee families.

A Sudanese woman, Hiba, who wore a full-length navy dress and a leopard-print head scarf, greeted my car on the street. She ushered me up a flight of stairs to the one-bedroom home that she shared with her husband, Ibrahim, and their three children. (Both names are pseudonyms.) The living area, tidy and sparsely furnished, was lined with several mattresses; it doubled as the children’s bedroom. The insulation was poor, and the home had no heat. A gray curtain hung on a single window, and soft light seeped around the edges and into the cool, incense-infused air.

“We had some furniture that we sold because we assumed we were not going to spend another winter in Jordan,” Hiba told me. A portable heater, a gas cylinder, sofas, and carpets—all had recently been unloaded. Ibrahim entered the room, limping slightly—the result of an injury he’d sustained in Sudan—and sat on a mattress. He was thin and wore a loose sweatsuit. The couple’s six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, played in the next room. The elder son, whom I’ll call Amar, was at school.

The family belongs to Sudan’s Nuba minority, a Black, ethnically diverse group of some three million people indigenous to the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan, an oil-rich, agricultural region next to Darfur. Various armed groups have long vied for control of the area, and have been accused of engaging in a campaign of atrocities against the Nuba and other communities there. In 2013, Hiba and Ibrahim survived an attack that killed some of their family members; they were displaced several times.

Ibrahim, whose legs were severely beaten in the incident, was unable to access proper medical treatment, and was in unrelenting pain. The family weighed their options. In early 2019, the brutal Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir verged on collapse, and the security situation in the country was uncertain. At that point, many Sudanese people were travelling to Egypt or Jordan with short-term visas. Hiba had heard that migrants were sometimes subjected to human and organ trafficking in Egypt. The prospects in Jordan seemed better. There, the family would be able to register with the United Nations Refugee Agency, or U.N.H.C.R., which could help them gain access to medical care and other services, and potentially refer them for resettlement in a third country.

Jordan has long been a magnet for refugees fleeing wars in the surrounding region, hosting millions of Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Somalis. Many see Jordan as a way station to permanent resettlement in Canada, the United States, or Europe, where the economic opportunities are better. But the bureaucracy of resettlement can stretch on for years, and by the early twenty-tens Jordan had one of the largest per-capita refugee populations on earth. (A tiny fraction of refugees worldwide are ever permanently resettled.) It began to implement policies to curb the influx. Unbeknownst to Hiba, the government had asked U.N.H.C.R. to suspend registering asylum seekers who arrived in Jordan after January 23, 2019. She and her family arrived on January 24th of that year, meaning that they had no viable path to resettlement through the agency. Within months, their visas lapsed. Since then, they have been living without legal status, financial aid, or health insurance.

Ibrahim’s injuries prevent him from working, so Hiba supports the household, often picking up private cleaning jobs from Facebook ads. A recent gig turned out to be a setup; when she arrived to clean the home, two men were waiting for her, and tried to grope and rape her—a common experience for refugee women, according to humanitarian agencies. There’s little incentive to report such incidents, as Jordanian authorities regularly round up and deport people who work without permits.

Black refugees in Jordan have described widespread racially motivated attacks and discrimination. This is true for adults and children alike. Amar, who is nine years old, has been hit and bullied at school; once, a classmate strangled him. Recently, Hiba told me, he was walking to the neighborhood pharmacy when he was attacked and robbed by a group of locals. He screamed and broke free, but Hiba said that, afterward, he started wetting the bed at night and praying that he would die. “Why did God create me Black?” he would ask her. “Is this punishment?”

“I told him to love yourself the way you are,” Hiba said. “I told him that God created us different, that the color Black is very distinguished—it’s very unique and very beautiful.” She went on, “I do my best to maintain his hope.”

In June, 2023, the family received a lifeline. A Sudanese acquaintance in Jordan informed them about an organization that helps refugees resettle in the United States. It was called the International Refugee Assistance Project. Hiba completed IRAP’s online form, and about eight months later, after several interviews, IRAP selected the family’s case for review and referral into the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. According to lawyers, the family was “at imminent risk of deportation and refoulement to Sudan,” where, Hiba said, they fear “violations or even death” on account of their ethnicity. By then, Sudan had plunged into a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which have both been accused of war crimes against non-Arab communities. (Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. State Department said that the R.S.F. and its allies committed genocide.)

In December, 2024, the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency that works with the State Department to process refugee-resettlement cases, called the family for an interview. The vetting process to become a refugee in the U.S. is among the most robust and painstaking immigration procedures in the world. The interview, which covered their family history, claim for refugee status, and biographical information, was meant to be followed by another with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as various medical and security screenings and a final orientation about U.S. culture. “I recall being ecstatic that this was going to happen, that I could build a better life,” Hiba said. “We were moving at a very expedited pace.”

Hiba began to sell their belongings. The twins daydreamed about eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and painting their new bedrooms pink and blue. Amar hoped to enter the medical profession. He already liked to produce “medicines,” made with toothpaste and other household items, and read about Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Hiba imagined seeing snow for the first time and living in a cold state, such as Ohio. She wanted to study journalism or become an artist-architect, like Zaha Hadid. She bought a celebratory dress, with gold-flowered embroidery, for the plane ride. She hung it in her wardrobe as a good omen.

On the morning of January 21, 2025, Hiba received a phone call from a friend. President Donald Trump, just hours into his second term, had issued an executive order titled “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program.” The policy suspended entry for all refugees and halted decisions on refugee applications; it also caused federal agencies to freeze millions of dollars in funding for resettlement. Hiba felt her body enter a state of shock, and she began sobbing. “It’s like we were flying up in the sky and suddenly we fell down,” she told me.

Hiba gathered Ibrahim and the children. Ibrahim tried to reassure her. “Inshallah, maybe it will just be a suspension for one or two months,” he said. “Maybe there will be exceptions for certain cases.” Amar felt something more foreboding. He recalled an Arab proverb: in a dish of lamb liver, “the unlucky person finds bones.”

As news spread of the suspension of the U.S. refugee program, chaos ensued. More than a hundred thousand people had been conditionally approved for resettlement, and many had been waiting for years. Refugee advocates and resettlement agencies called the order arbitrary, capricious, and illegal. The Refugee Act, passed by Congress, with bipartisan support, in 1980, requires the President to consult with lawmakers when establishing a ceiling for refugee admissions each year, based on humanitarian concerns. Before leaving office, Biden set the ceiling at a hundred and twenty-five thousand. Trump had unilaterally blocked any effort to reach it.

Federal agencies stopped processing refugee cases almost immediately. More than twelve thousand people whose trips had already been scheduled had their flights cancelled. The order stranded them indefinitely, sometimes in life-threatening conditions. In some cases, families were separated. One Sudanese family of ten had spent years living in the Kakuma refugee camp, in northwestern Kenya. All but two of them—the elderly mother, who was in her mid-seventies, and an adult daughter—had resettled in the U.S. They were meant to travel to Washington State just days before Trump’s Inauguration. When they boarded their flight in Nairobi, officials pulled the daughter aside. The fingerprints that she had to submit for her resettlement application were slightly smudged, and she needed to obtain new ones, they told her. She was unable to get them before the ban, and was sent back to the refugee camp. (The mother, meanwhile, made it to Seattle.) “All of these people are just stuck,” Lawrence Bartlett, the former director of refugee admissions at the State Department, told me. “And they’re not going to move.”

In the lead-up to the suspension, IRAP had more than two hundred and fifty clients in Jordan. It scrambled to figure out what to do. Elisa Vari, a senior staff attorney based in Amman, told me that she had been expecting “delays, increased scrutiny, and security checks,” but that the reality—a “complete and indefinite halt”—was far worse than she feared. “It seemed too cruel,” she said. “The law should be more predictable than this.”

For decades, the U.S. accounted for more than two-thirds of refugee resettlements globally, often accepting more than all other countries combined. When the Refugee Act was passed, then President Jimmy Carter said that it reflected the country’s commitment to being a “haven for people uprooted by persecution and political turmoil.” Former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, one of the co-authors, has portrayed the act as a corrective to the moral failure of refusing entry to many Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Toward the end of the Cold War, it allowed many who were fleeing Communist regimes in Europe and Asia to find safe harbor in America.

In 2024, more than a hundred thousand refugees were admitted to the U.S., mostly escaping violence and instability in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. “Not only was the U.S. our biggest resettlement partner but they were also the most flexible in terms of cases and profiles they would take,” a U.N.H.C.R. official who covers the Middle East and North Africa told me. “The Europeans have much smaller quotas, and some countries place conditions like higher education and language abilities.” The system, the official said, becomes less of “a protection tool, or a tool to support the most vulnerable.” Without the U.S. program, “there are very, very few options,” Kurt Bonz, IRAP’s Jordan country director, told me. During Trump’s first term, Bonz explained, when the U.S. stepped back from refugee resettlement, “other countries stepped forward significantly.” Canada and several European countries, for instance, took in thousands more people. Now, Bonz continued, many of those same countries have reduced quotas or tightened criteria. In Europe, especially, several far-right and nationalist parties have made electoral gains on anti-immigrant platforms, including in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. “The space is contracting,” he said.

Trump has accused refugees and immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” of being terrorists and criminals, of being freeloaders who “contribute nothing.” In fact, a recent study published by the Department of Health and Human Services found that, between 2005 and 2019, refugees and asylees paid more in taxes—an estimated five hundred and eighty-one billion dollars—than they cost in government expenditures. “They’ve been given a second chance at life, and they take it,” Bartlett told me. “They work in a whole variety of sectors that, frankly, not all Americans want to work in. Talk to employers, talk to your hotel people, talk to the meatpacking plant.”

A country-wide resettlement network of nonprofit organizations, many of them faith-based, work with employers, schools, landlords, and state and local governments to help newly arrived refugees integrate. “What’s special about the U.S. refugee program is that it is comprehensive to bringing refugees here safely and helping them receive skills and education needed to rebuild,” Beth Oppenheim, the top executive of HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a global refugee resettlement agency, told me. “The program has allowed people not only to treat their own trauma but to understand how they might be helpful to others in their community who have welcomed them.” She recalled a Sudanese man who lives in Kent, Washington, who had arrived from a refugee camp, earned a college degree, and is now a crisis counsellor on a mental-health hotline. Many of the refugees she’s worked with, she said, “have provided a blueprint for what being a compassionate citizen in our country looks like.”

Nearly three weeks after Trump suspended the refugee program, he issued another executive order, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” calling for a new resettlement program exclusively for Afrikaners, the primarily white descendants of European colonists in South Africa. Afrikaners helped build the apartheid regime and, the order alleges, “are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” In recent years, far-right activists have pushed a narrative that Afrikaner farmers are being murdered in a white genocide, a claim that has been promoted by Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and other Trump Administration advisers. Some white farmers have indeed been killed, often during brutal armed robberies, but those cases account for less than one per cent of the country’s annual murder rate. (A South African judge recently described the claim of white genocide as “clearly imagined and not real.”) By the end of 2025, more than a thousand Afrikaners were resettled in the United States. “That’s kind of the new lay of the land,” Bartlett said. Abdel Dana Roca, the director of refugee-integration services for a group called Gulf Coast J.F.C.S., in central Florida, told me that most of its programming has been shuttered owing to the suspension. But his office still has some work to do: under a contract with the Trump Administration, it has been tasked with resettling some of the Afrikaners.

In February 2025, IRAP filed a class-action lawsuit, Pacito v. Trump, on behalf of a group of refugees and several U.S.-based organizations whose funding to provide resettlement services was frozen. (Thousands of employees at such organizations have been laid off or furloughed.) In June, Trump issued a proclamation barring or restricting U.S. entry for certain nationals, including those from Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan, claiming that it was necessary to protect the country against terrorist threats. In December, he expanded the ban, which now covers thirty-nine countries, many of which account for some of the world’s largest refugee populations. This is effectively an insurance policy. Even if the Administration loses Pacito, it can use the travel bans to continue to deny entry to people from those countries. “The Trump Administration is trying everything it can to prevent all but white Afrikaners from resettling in the United States,” Melissa Keaney, a senior supervising attorney at IRAP, said, in response to the June proclamation. “The refugee ban is unlawful, the travel ban is unlawful, and the Trump Administration must not be allowed to evade court orders by engaging in a game of Whac-a-Mole.”

Before coming to Jordan, Hiba and Ibrahim lived as subsistence farmers, growing corn in a village in Abu Karshola, in the foothills of the Nuba Mountains. The Nuba people in Abu Karshola have been systematically attacked by the Arab-controlled government in Khartoum and its allied militias for decades. In 1992, Bashir’s regime declared jihad against the Nuba, many of whom had joined southern separatist forces that opposed Khartoum. In 2011, those separatist forces broke away to form South Sudan, but the Nuba remained, and the violence against them continued.

One morning in 2013, before the sun had risen, Hiba and Ibrahim heard gunshots and screams. The sounds grew louder, and soon armed and masked men were swarming the village, setting its straw huts on fire and indiscriminately shooting villagers.

Several men entered Hiba and Ibrahim’s hut. With the butts of their rifles, they beat Ibrahim’s head, genitals, and knees, tearing his cruciate ligaments. Several of them gang-raped Hiba as Ibrahim watched. Hiba and Ibrahim could tell that the men belonged to an Arab militia, likely the R.S.F., because of their lighter skin and dialect. Before leaving, the men said, “You slaves, fuck your mothers. We will kill you and get rid of you.” (The R.S.F. did not respond to a request for comment.)

Hiba, who was pregnant, temporarily lost consciousness. After the attack, she and Ibrahim went to the home of his parents, only to discover that their hut had been reduced to ruins, and that they had been burned alive. Corpses were scattered across the village. Hiba’s family lived farther away; she and Ibrahim weren’t able to check on them before they had to flee. They still don’t know if her relatives survived.

In a villager’s truck, the couple escaped to neighboring North Kordofan, to a camp for internally displaced people. There, Hiba bled through her skirt and had a miscarriage. The camp was rife with illnesses, including cholera, and Ibrahim became severely sick. Eventually, they were able to relocate to Khartoum. Ibrahim provided overnight security for a car dealership in exchange for a room. In 2017, Hiba gave birth to Amar.

Meanwhile, Ibrahim’s health deteriorated. He had difficulty moving because of his leg injuries and had developed kidney problems, likely related to his ailments at the camp; at one point, he weighed less than ninety pounds. One night, when he was at work, a group of men broke in and attacked him with knives. Khartoum was safer than Kordofan, but Nuba and other minority groups were still subjected to arbitrary arrests and detention. In January, 2019, amid the popular uprising that would ultimately dissolve Bashir’s government, Ibrahim’s employer assisted the family in obtaining visas and plane tickets to Jordan. “When we left the catastrophic situation in Sudan, all we wanted was to be in a country that was safer,” Hiba said. “But being here, under threat, without documents, running from police who can send us back to Sudan, I don’t feel safe.”

One recent Sunday morning, I met Vari, the senior staff attorney, and Ra’ed Almasri, a casework manager, at IRAP’s Jordan offices. We packed into Almasri’s car and drove an hour and a half into the desert, to the Zaatari refugee camp. Zaatari, which is less than ten miles from the Syrian border, was established in 2012 to accommodate refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war. At its peak, the camp housed some two hundred thousand people. It has since become a semi-permanent city, with thousands of prefabricated shelters, dozens of schools, and a “market street”—known locally as Shams-Élysées—with purveyors of falafel sandwiches, wedding dresses, and haircuts. About fifty thousand people still reside in the camp, including a few of IRAP’s clients.

Accessing the camp and its residents requires pre-approval from the Jordanian government. Residents must receive permission to leave, and a handler accompanied us on our visit. Two IRAP clients, whom I’ll call Ahmed and Fatima, joined us in the conference room of a U.N.H.C.R. office building. They had just marked their thirteenth anniversary in Zaatari. They had fled Daraa, considered the birthplace of the Syrian uprising, in 2012, expecting to spend just a few months in Jordan until the hostilities died down. More than a decade later, the government of Bashar al-Assad finally fell. Ahmed and Fatima were joyful that half a century of tyranny had come to an end, but they were also anxious and afraid of being forcibly returned to Syria. Though U.N.H.C.R. has facilitated some voluntary returns, many refugees in Jordan are wary of going back, as the security situation there remains fragile.

Staying in Zaatari, though, comes with its own challenges. The prefabricated shelters, called “caravans,” that families live in have aged far beyond their intended life spans, and families have died inside caravans that have caught fire. Ahmed’s family of ten—the couple has seven children, and also cares for Ahmed’s elderly father—lives in two adjoining caravans made of metal sheets. They use stacks of purple pillows and floor mats for sleeping. The caravans leak during the rainy season and become ovens during the summer. A U.N.H.C.R. employee in the camp estimated that the majority of people there hope to resettle in Western countries. “It’s a major trauma for them that resettlement has stopped,” she said.

In December, 2024, the same month that the Assad regime fell, Ahmed and Fatima received a call from an International Organization for Migration official. Nearly six years after they had submitted their application to come to the U.S., they were finally approved to travel, and in a few months would be able to join Ahmed’s sister and her family, who had already resettled in New Jersey. They called them to share the news. “We were really happy,” Ahmed said. “We thought, We’re good, we’re gonna travel. We had our dreams.” The children spoke of the local sweets they’d bring as gifts, and the places they’d like to visit when they arrived: the beach, a park. “The thought of travelling helped the children survive the current situation in the camp,” he told me.

In January, after Trump took office, they received another call: their flight had been cancelled. More than a year has passed since. “My mind has stopped,” Ahmed said. “I see sadness and despair on my children’s faces. I don’t know what to do. We want to live a dignified life.”

Since the suspension, IRAP has struggled to resettle any of its Jordan clients who had been in the U.S. pipeline. And it has had to turn away new clients who would otherwise qualify for priority resettlement. “It makes you question a lot,” Vari said. “What’s the point of doing this work? What’s the point of absorbing all this trauma if I can’t help?” She went on, “We’ve been trying to reframe what success means.” Perhaps, she said, “it is no longer helping the person get to safety. But even just helping them recount their story, seeing it written out compellingly on a piece of paper, it’s still kind of cathartic for many people.”

Almasri told me about a recent screening for a potential client. A woman from Darfur, who had just arrived in Amman, recounted that she was home boiling water for her sister to use to bathe when armed men, who she said were R.S.F., barged in. They “shot my sister and put her three-day-old baby’s head in the boiling water, killing him,” she said. In the same incident, she told Almasri, “they shot my father in the back of his head. His face exploded.” The woman explained that she had also been shot and passed out. She hoped to get to the U.S. somehow to join relatives there. In Jordan, where she has no work authorization, she has been forced to take cleaning jobs and has faced multiple sexual-assault attempts. “We had to tell her, ‘No, we can’t assist,’ ” Almasri said. “I feel guilty. I don’t know how else to describe it. I feel guilty.”

One morning, at IRAP’s Amman offices, I met a family who fled Iraq more than twenty years ago. The husband had worked as a driver for a subcontractor of K.B.R., then a subsidiary of the major U.S. defense contractor Halliburton. Following the U.S.-led invasion, in 2003, several of his colleagues had been killed, and he faced death threats. After first applying for resettlement in Jordan, in 2004, the family was finally approved to move to Kentucky, in February, 2025. Their trip, too, was cancelled.

Since American forces withdrew from Afghanistan, in 2021, about two hundred thousand Afghans—many of whom worked as interpreters, translators, or staff with U.S.-led military missions and companies—have resettled in the U.S. with their families. Many came under special immigrant-visa programs, designed to provide endangered allies a pathway to green-card status. These programs are technically separate from the refugee program, but they, too, have been disrupted. Roughly a thousand Afghans, a number of whom were already vetted for U.S. resettlement, were evacuated to Qatar after thewithdrawal; they are reportedly being considered for third-country resettlement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country facing a protracted conflict and displacement crisis.

Now even refugees who are already living in the U.S. may be subjected to “re-vetting” procedures. This winter, during the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement surge in Minnesota, more than a hundred refugees were arrested, detained, transferred to facilities as far away as Texas, and interrogated. It is unknown if any have been deported. Courts have temporarily blocked this re-vetting effort, but refugee advocates are expecting the Department of Homeland Security to try to find workarounds. “The Biden Administration failed American citizens by undermining basic vetting and screening processes,” Zach Kahler, a spokesman for the Administration, told me. “Unfortunately, this recklessness allowed dangerous people, including national-security and public-safety threats, into our country.”

With nearly all resettlement options foreclosed, many IRAP clients are now living on the margins. In Amman, I met one man, named Mohsin, in his mid-twenties, who slept under cardboard boxes at a local market. In 2019, Mohsin went to pick up his mother at her vegetable stand in Nyala, South Darfur, when armed men stormed the area and shot villagers at random. He fled, eventually making it to Jordan. In the weeks after I left the country, he wrote me a string of desperate messages. He also sent videos that showed that his face had been bloodied. “I was beaten in the market, and right now I feel so much pain in my back and stomach,” he told me. It was only a matter of time before he was sent back to Sudan, he said, where he was certain he would be killed. “I’m so scared,” he said. (I have since been unable to reach him.)

IRAP had previously referred clients in these circumstances to a nonprofit called the Center for Victims of Torture, which is based in the U.S. but has extensive operations overseas. C.V.T. had run a program in Jordan, funded by the U.S. State Department, that for seventeen years provided refugees with mental-health, physiotherapy, and psychological support.

When Trump returned to office, Osama Ahmad Al-Mohammad, who ran Jordan’s C.V.T. programming, received a stop-work order from the State Department. People showed up the following morning for their sessions, but he and his colleagues were forced to turn them away. If employees violated the stop-work order, they feared that they could face disciplinary or even legal consequences.

Part of C.V.T.’s programming entailed ten-week group-therapy sessions. “Someone will tell you how her father was killed, or how she was raped,” Al-Mohammad said. “And normally it is very emotional and very tough. People would cry, really suffer a lot during these sessions.” Only in the last handful of sessions, he went on, do “people start to recover with the support from our team.” The stop-work order fell right in the middle of a ten-week session. “We just left people behind,” Al-Mohammad said. “We left people just in this very difficult moment.” A client had told Al-Mohammad that “C.V.T. is a part of my motivation for wanting to live.” Another said, “If I did not work with C.V.T., I might have killed myself already.” Al-Mohammad tried to refer clients elsewhere, but “most other sister organizations got impacted with very similar decisions,” he said. “Many refugees have turned to negative coping mechanisms to survive, including child labor and trafficking.” Others, he said, the team has simply lost contact with.

One of IRAP’s clients, Najmaldeen Mussa, a man in his thirties of Fur ethnicity, from Darfur, had done counselling with C.V.T. When Mussa was a teen-ager, in the mid-two-thousands, the janjaweed militia—essentially a predecessor to the R.S.F.—had killed his father outside of their home. In a separate attack, his brother was killed in front of him; two of his siblings have disappeared and are still missing. Mussa himself was tortured and repeatedly detained after participating in student-led, anti-government protests in Khartoum. During arrests, he was called a “dirty Darfur person,” a “dog,” and a “slave.” He was whipped and hit over the head. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, were being disappeared. Mussa was forced to flee to Jordan in 2020, after he was abducted and beaten so badly that he lost consciousness. He had married three years earlier, and had to leave his wife behind.

Mussa was meant to resettle in Nebraska, in February, 2025. When he received the call from I.O.M. that the flight had been cancelled, he thought it was a joke. Then he checked Facebook and saw posts confirming the news. “I don’t have words to describe my feeling,” he said. “The entire program was a lie, everything I went through was a lie.” A month later, he was working without legal status at a construction site in Amman and was caught in a sweep by government labor inspectors. He was arrested and sent to a detention facility. He is now awaiting “imminent deportation” back to Sudan, “despite his well-founded fear of persecution,” according to his request for resettlement.

Jordanian authorities denied my efforts to see Mussa in person, but, during a recent visit with Almasri, the casework manager, Mussa said that he and a group of other Sudanese men were separated from the general population and placed in cells with no clean drinking water, no beds, and no access to the library or commissary. (The Ministry of Interior in Jordan did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mussa had hoped to sponsor his wife to reunite with him in the U.S., but he hadn’t been able to reach her for months. “I know she is probably in areas affected by the current war,” Mussa said. “In my head, there is a seventy-to-ninety-per-cent chance that she is dead.” He started to cry.

“I ask God what did I do to deserve this,” Mussa said. “Imagine losing twenty to thirty people at one time. At this point, I feel like I’m dead anyway, so I think why not go back to Sudan and die instead of dying in prison.”

Bridget Crawford, director of law and policy at Immigration Equality, a U.S.-based nonprofit, told me, “It’s really being lost in the political narrative what’s at stake.” Crawford’s team had participated in a Biden-era pilot program meant to help vulnerable L.G.B.T.Q.+ people resettle in the U.S. One of the people they’d referred was a transgender Somali woman living in Kenya. She was an aspiring makeup artist and had recently escaped a forced-conversion center, where she was beaten, burned, and repeatedly raped. Her resettlement interview was approaching when refugee processing was suspended. Crawford’s team received news shortly afterward that she was murdered in an apparent anti-trans attack.

The Trump Administration capped resettlement slots for the 2026 fiscal year at seventy-five hundred, a historic low. So far, some six thousand people have been admitted; all but three, who are from Afghanistan, are Afrikaners. This past fall, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, the Administration pushed to make refugee status “temporary, not permanent,” a radical shift from well-defined international norms. This would exempt the U.S. and other states from practicing one of the foundational principles of international refugee law—called non-refoulement—which prevents returning refugees to places where they are likely to face persecution. U.N.H.C.R. has cut some five thousand jobs and reduced aid, resettlement, education, and support services for survivors of torture and gender-based violence. “There is no pathway to the U.S. now, and few countries are willing to take more numbers,” Oppenheim, of HIAS, told me.

Recently, I checked in with Hiba via a WhatsApp call. Her younger son has developed Bell’s palsy; she and Ibrahim can’t afford the cost of the specialized care he requires. They have also received an eviction notice; for months, they have been unable to pay rent and would have to vacate their home in two weeks. They weren’t sure where they would go. It was the holy month of Ramadan, and the family gathered in the evenings for their daily prayers. Every night was the same prayer: “Oh, God, we pray to be safe and to be in a place where we can be happy and help our children make up for what they’ve missed.” ♦