Ninth Circuit blocks Trump travel ban protecting approved refugees

Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, which created the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and requires the president to consult with Congress before setting annual refugee admission ceilings. President Biden set the fiscal year 2025 ceiling at 125,000 refugees on Sept. 30, 2024. By Jan. 20, 2025, roughly 12,000 refugees had completed the full multi-year vetting process — background checks by USCIS, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, and State Department — received conditional approval, and had arranged travel to the United States.

Executive Order 14163, 'Restricting Alien Entry,' suspended USRAP indefinitely on Jan. 20. It halted all refugee processing for at least 90 days pending a Homeland Security review of whether admissions were in the 'national interest.' The same day, the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) canceled all refugee flights — including for those 12,000 with booked travel. Within days, PRM also suspended funding to the nine national resettlement agencies that receive federal cooperative agreements to deliver housing, job placement, and integration services.

The lead plaintiff, identified only as 'Pacito' to protect his safety, is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who completed the full USRAP vetting process and was scheduled to fly to the United States with his wife and newborn baby on Jan. 22, 2025. When his travel was canceled two days before his flight, Pacito had already sold all of his belongings. He sheltered with his family in the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. His case became the legal anchor for the entire Ninth Circuit ruling: the court defined 'conditionally approved' refugees with protection as those in situations 'like Plaintiff Pacito, who sold all of his belongings in anticipation of flying to safety.'

The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) filed suit on his behalf — along with Church World Service (CWS), HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), Lutheran Community Services Northwest (LCSNW), and eight other named individual refugees — on Feb. 5, 2025, in the Western District of 🌲Washington.

U.S. District Judge JNJamal N. Whitehead, a Biden appointee in Seattle, issued a nationwide preliminary injunction on Feb. 25, 2025. He ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits because the executive order had 'crossed the line from permissible discretionary action to effective nullification of congressional will' — specifically Congress's explicit directives in the Refugee Act of 1980 about how the refugee program operates. Whitehead also issued a second preliminary injunction on March 24 ordering the State Department to reinstate cooperative agreements with the nine resettlement agencies whose federal funding had been cut.

The government immediately appealed both injunctions to the Ninth Circuit. On March 3, Whitehead denied the government's emergency motion to stay his first injunction pending the appeal. The government then asked the Ninth Circuit directly.

On March 25, 2025, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel issued its ruling: it granted the government's stay of the first preliminary injunction in part — allowing the refugee suspension to take effect broadly — but denied the stay as to refugees who had been 'conditionally approved for refugee status by USCIS before January 20, 2025.' That carve-out meant the executive order could not block resettlement for the most advanced cases.

The government immediately tried to minimize the carve-out, arguing it covered only about 160 people whose flights were within two weeks of Jan. 20. Judge Whitehead called that argument 'interpretive jiggery-pokery of the highest order' in a May 5 enforcement order, citing Scalia's King v. Burwell dissent. Whitehead applied the protection to approximately 12,000 refugees who had conditional approval and arranged travel plans — not the 160 the government proposed.

On April 11, 2025, Whitehead found the government was not complying with the injunction as it applied to conditionally approved refugees and issued a compliance order requiring the government to resume processing and report on its schedule. The government filed an emergency motion to stay that compliance order on July 17. The Ninth Circuit issued a temporary administrative stay on July 19, buying the government more time.

The Ninth Circuit issued a clarification order on April 21 narrowing the protected class to three criteria: the refugee had an approved application authorizing CBP to admit them 'conditionally as a refugee upon arrival at the port within four months'; USCIS had cleared them for travel; and they had 'arranged and confirmable travel plans' as of Jan. 20. That definition covered approximately 12,000 people according to Whitehead's May 5 order — but the government argued the Ninth Circuit's language about not applying to 'tens of thousands' meant only the 160 closest to departure were protected.

A second, broader travel ban — distinct from EO 14163's refugee-specific suspension — took effect June 9, 2025, targeting nationals of certain countries. That travel ban operated on a separate legal track from the refugee case but affected many of the same populations. 🌲Washington State Attorney General NFNick Ferguson pursued parallel legal challenges to the broader travel ban, continuing the pattern of state-led litigation over presidential immigration authority that Washington State pioneered in 2017 when then-AG Bob Ferguson (no relation) challenged Trump's first-term travel ban before the same Seattle federal court.

The Ninth Circuit cited Trump v. 🌺Hawaii (2018) — the Supreme Court's ruling upholding Trump's first-term travel ban — in its April 21 clarification order, noting the government was 'likely to succeed on the merits' on the broader refugee suspension. The court's reference to that precedent suggested the overall USRAP suspension would ultimately survive legal challenge even if the carve-out for conditionally approved refugees held.

The resettlement agency funding suspension caused cascading failures across the nonprofit sector. Church World Service, HIAS, and Lutheran Community Services Northwest — three of the nine national agencies with federal cooperative agreements — reported having to lay off hundreds of workers and suspend services to refugees who had already arrived in the United States before Jan. 20. The nine national agencies collectively operate through a network of more than 300 local affiliates across the country.

Whitehead's March 24 injunction ordering restoration of the cooperative agreements provided partial relief, but agencies reported that the disruption to staffing and operations took months to recover from. Refugees who had arrived in the U.S. shortly before Jan. 20 and were in their first 90 days of resettlement — the period covered by federal cooperative agreements — found their case managers suddenly unavailable and their services cut off mid-stream.

The United States historically accepted more refugees for resettlement than any other country. Between 1975 and 2020, the U.S. resettled more than three million refugees. The FY 2025 ceiling of 125,000 set by Biden was the highest in decades; Trump had set the ceiling at 18,000 in FY 2020, the lowest in the program's history. Under EO 14163, refugee admissions effectively fell to zero after Jan. 20, 2025, except for the court-ordered processing of conditionally approved individuals.

Faith communities and refugee advocates from across the political spectrum opposed the suspension. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — a historically conservative institution that receives federal funding for refugee resettlement — strongly objected to the policy. Several Republican-led states, including 🤠Texas and 🌴Florida, had previously opted out of USRAP entirely under a 2019 Trump executive order that allowed governors to block refugee placement in their states, though courts had ruled that order largely unenforceable.