Nine months after launching his campaign promise to crack down on migration, Trump is taking a swing at the UN asylum system. As countries meet this week in Geneva to discuss funding for refugee protection, what will the US rhetoric mean for international agencies?
Blocks away from the United Nations headquarters in New York, where, just two days earlier, US president Donald Trump accused the organisation of financing illegal migration and telling countries they were being ruined by migratory flows, US government officials convened a carefully orchestrated meeting to hone down on those messages.
Christopher Landau, deputy state department secretary, told international attendees at the Lotte Palace Hotel, one of the city’s priciest, that the global asylum system no longer made sense. Officials from five other countries subsequently echoed his talking points.
Landau claimed that more than 90 per cent of people requesting asylum are found to be ineligible for asylum and that abuse of the system by economic migrants was particularly rife, suggesting that countries should make the overhaul of the system enshrined by the 1951 refugee convention a “top international priority”. Analysis, however, has found that such claims that only a fraction of people seeking asylum had faced credible fear of persecution, which already predated the current US administration, were misleading.
“The asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws,” Landau argued, holding the UN partly responsible for “encouraging countries to adopt these laws”.
Landau, born in Spain and whose father had fled Nazi Austria to Colombia before moving to the US, presented five “principles” for reframing the international approach to asylum. He said countries had the sovereign right to control their borders and who they let in, while migrants should have no right to decide where they chose to ask for asylum. Also, refugee status being temporary, sovereign states alone should determine if conditions in refugees’ countries of origin allow for returns, while all countries should accept the return of their nationals.
“There is a whole network of NGOs and multilateral institutions that are promoting people to (migrate), giving them a script that if you say this, then you will be entitled to an asylum here,” Landau claimed.
A senior security officer from Bangladesh, which is struggling with its own refugee crisis following donor cuts, complained about how so much international funding had been spent on protecting some 725,000 Rohingyas who had fled Myanmar, while little effort was made to find a political solution. He said the situation had improved for Rohingyas in Myanmar, though rights groups warn that assurances for the safe return of the refugees to the country are nonexistent.
Sitting in the front row of the audience, Filippo Grandi, UN high commissioner for refugees, defended asylum, describing it as an “ancient concept…in all cultures and religions recognised as a life-saving instrument”. He challenged Landau’s remarks, arguing that the right to seek asylum was not incompatible with nations’ sovereignty and did not give everyone a licence to move.
From domestic politics to global reach
Christopher Landau, US deputy secretary of state, speaking at a side event organised during the high-level week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, flanked by senior government officials from Panama, Kosovo, Liberia and Bangladesh, 25 September 2025. (Geneva Solutions/Paula Dupraz-Dobias)
The Trump administration’s attempt to influence global migration policies came just a week before a flight carrying undocumented Iranians held in detention were sent back to Iran, including individuals from ethnic and religious minorities who may risk persecution.
During the first eight months of the year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) deported nearly 200,000 people, following the president’s campaign promise to go after criminals. However data has proven that nearly three quarters of those detained had no criminal conviction. Immigration officials have also gone after people seeking asylum, resuming the tactic of family separations, intended to force them and migrants to leave the US. The UN human rights office and NGOs like Human Rights Watch have condemned the practices.
By no longer recognising asylum claims, the government has denied claims at the US border with Mexico and stripped protections from applicants on the premise that their cases were dismissed due to its earlier insufficient processing capacity. Migrants have furthermore been deported to third countries, including to prisons in South Sudan and Eswatini, where the US government has itself warned of human rights violations. Just last week, the UN human rights office demanded that Ghana halt deportations of international deportees from the US to their countries of origin, where they faced a risk of torture.
For Vincent Chetail, director of the Global Migration Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, the recent statements made by Trump and Landau scrutinising the roles of international organisations and conventions suggests that the US is “becoming a new state”, disregarding its past international commitments, including to the 1967 refugees protocol and the Convention against Torture.
Landau’s proposed principles, he says, are a “violation of international conventions and customary international law”. The migration expert notes that non-refoulement and the right to seek asylum are both part of international law.
“It is a mix of misunderstanding, ignorance and manipulation to say that migrants should not have the right to decide where they choose to ask for asylum,” Chetail says.
While the rhetoric may simply be a strategy of diversion away from the government’s international policy failures, such as in ending wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Chetail believes it may prove worrisome for the UN system and the global asylum order.
“The problem is that the rhetoric used by Trump as the leader of the most powerful country in the world may obviously undermine the asylum regime,” he adds.
Tough timing
Washington’s new global migration discourse could barely come at a more challenging time for the UN’s migration system. Both the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have had to proceed with deep staff cuts, downsize their office and relocate workers due to significant funding cuts mainly by their top donor, the US.
Read more: International Geneva layoffs pile up amid painful funding cuts
Explaining to Landau that with almost 80 per cent of the world’s refugees coming from low and middle income countries, Grandi stressed that those people had greatest need of assistance. “It is very difficult to help them right now with all the cuts that we have made to assistance.”
Agencies report that health, education and sanitation services for displaced people, as well as critical refugee registration and biometrics, are being hit by cuts, as the overall scale of operations is curtailed.
This week, the UNHCR’s executive committee is expected to review the organisation’s projected 2026 budget, which would be nearly a fifth smaller than this year’s.
Restructuring plans across the UN system have, meanwhile, resuscitated the idea of a UNHCR-IOM merger, though some experts say this may prove difficult due to the incompatibility of mandates.
Possible scenarios
Foreseeing the US’s next move following its stance at the UN General Assembly is challenging given the administration’s ubiquitous unpredictability, says Chetail. One scenario may be for the US to cut more funding to the IOM and the UNHCR, further threatening their operations. Replacing such financial support may prove difficult as neither China nor Europe are particularly willing to take the lead on refugee and migration issues.
Another possibility, the migration expert says, is that the US withdraws entirely from the UNHCR and the IOM, like it already did with the UN’s cultural and educational agency, Unesco. For the UN migration agency, such a decision would be a blow, according to Chetail, given it was the US which created it in 1951 in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its current head, Amy Pope, was nominated by former Democratic president Joe Biden, putting her in a tough spot.
“An attempt to please the US could be a way for the IOM to save itself,” says Chetail. “IOM’s mandate is more flexible and vague than the UNHCR, which has a strong protection mandate and might be used in this direction.”
Since the start of the year, IOM has responded to the “rising demand for return assistance” in the Americas, to help migrants return to their countries of origin from the US. This has involved implementing a controversial programme inviting people willing to self-deport or face immediate deportation and hefty fines.