Overview
- The White House on Tuesday amplified a Cato Institute analysis of State Department data showing combined immigrant visas and refugee admissions from 45 majority‑Muslim countries fell from about 21,096 in December 2024 to roughly 808 in February 2026, a decline of about 96 percent.
- Refugee resettlement from those countries effectively stopped, with refugee admissions reported at about 5,157 in December 2024 and zero by February 2026 according to the compiled figures.
- Analysts and the administration link the drop to a sequence of executive actions — including presidential proclamations, multi‑country visa pauses, an immigrant visa interview freeze, and refugee allocation changes — that tightened vetting and curtailed processing for dozens of countries.
- Republican officials and the White House celebrated the numbers as a security victory, while authors of the Cato analysis and civil‑rights advocates warned of legal, humanitarian and economic harms; litigation has already blocked or altered some measures in court.
- The decline hit certain nationalities especially hard — Afghans fell from 5,563 admissions to nine in the cited period and Pakistanis saw about a 98 percent drop — raising concerns about family reunification, refugee safety and the prospect that fiscal year 2026 could record the fewest such admissions in decades.