State Department shakeup won’t prevent the next mass migration crisis

— unless the Trump administration cuts ties to the UN 🌐 International Organization for Migration and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees

By Kim Wexler as published by Border Hawk News.

President Trump’s executive orders, the proposed 2025 State Department reorganization, and the FY 2026 discretionary budget aim to address the Biden-era mass migration crisis through policy, structural changes and funding adjustments. However, these measures may be inadequate to prevent the crisis from reemerging in the future. A lasting solution will require fully disengaging from the United Nations’ migration and refugee agencies and dismantling the institutional capacity for migration to the United States.

President Donald Trump recognizes the harms caused by open borders, and his new team is executing its mandate to maintain secure borders and to enforce U.S. immigration law in good faith. Examination of official policy documents of the Joe Biden administration leaves no room for doubt: the border security crisis was caused not by negligence or dereliction, but by affirmative policy choices.

A cascade of Executive Orders signed on January 20, 2025 canceled misguided Biden-era pro-migration policies, suspended programs including the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), and halted funding for resettlement agencies. President Trump’s FY 2026 Discretionary Budget Request of May 2, 2025 seeks to make changes permanent by cutting the State Department’s budget by nearly half — including the elimination of $3.5 billion used by the Biden State Department “to facilitate mass, illegal migration on the premise of mostly bogus refugee status.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s new proposed organizational chart dismantles USAID, restructures the Office of Foreign Assistance, and merges some of these functions — including the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP) — into the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM).

President Trump reversed Biden’s EO 14010, titled “Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and To Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States’ Border.” Section 2(a) of Biden’s EO directed the National Security Advisor, “in coordination with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the heads of any other relevant executive departments and agencies” to prepare:

(i) the United States Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration (the “Root Causes Strategy”); and

(ii) the United States Strategy for Collaboratively Managing Migration in the Region (the “Collaborative Management Strategy”).

The Biden EO specifies the Root Causes Strategy (later delegated to “Border Czar” Kamala Harris) “shall identify and prioritize actions to address the underlying factors leading to migration … tak[ing] into account … the views of bilateral, multilateral, and private sector partners, as well as civil society….” (Sec. 2(b)). The Collaborative Management Strategy “shall identify and prioritize actions to strengthen cooperative efforts to address migration flows” and “promptly begin consultations with civil society, the private sector, international organizations, and governments in the region.” (Sec. 2(c)). The execution of these strategies involved partnerships in which federal agencies — particularly the State Department — engaged with a wide range of stakeholders.

National Security Council. Collaborative Migration Management Strategy. July 2021, p.5.

President Trump’s Executive Orders do not explicitly name the multilateral organizations Biden’s State Department partnered with. They were, primarily, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In January, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies reported in Daily Wire that these UN agencies intended to maintain 2025 and 2026 migration-related spending levels in Latin America “as high as when a mass migration torrent was at full throttle in recent years,” budgeting $1.4 billion for 2025 and $1.2 billion for 2026.

But my reading of President Trump’s EO 14148 paragraph (u) (revoking EO 14010) and paragraph (x) (revoking President Biden’s EO 14013 “Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration”) means also revoking secondary actions taken in furtherance of Biden and the UN’s migration agenda. Fulfillment of Trump’s EO 14148 therefore requires the complete termination of those partnerships through the rescission of Memoranda of Understanding between PRM and the UN migration agencies. Moreover, as PRM shifts to accommodate additional programs and responsibilities, relevant sections of the Foreign Affairs Manual must be revised to remove language reflecting UN-influenced priorities.

The State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM)

PRM leads U.S. humanitarian diplomacy to protect and assist refugees, stateless persons and conflict victims. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees are defined as individuals forced to flee their country due to persecution, war, or violence, with a well-founded fear of harm based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Refugees are eligible to apply for asylum and resettlement in a safe country. Migrants, on the other hand, do not satisfy the legal definition of “refugee” and typically move voluntarily for reasons unrelated to persecution, such as the pursuit of economic opportunity.

In September 2024 Phillip Linderman, writing in The American Conservative, made the case for a “complete overhaul of State’s PRM Bureau,” which he says “fosters global illegal migration.” Linderman discussed how PRM, under Biden, had “vastly expanded” its domestic mission:

PRM doles out around $4 billion annually, mainly to establishment international organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). These multilateral organizations, funded by Washington, do more than manage genuine refugees and displaced persons. They are the juggernaut of today’s open-border ideology, taking resources from donor governments to promote concepts that chip away and undermine national borders, while advancing a global “right to migrate.”

Linderman points to generous “first-world asylum policies” as the major “pull factors” drawing migration to the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and the European Union: “PRM is the banker that writes the check that pays to keep it all in motion.”

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM)

The Biden administration entered into and honored international agreements that fostered illegal migration, undermining our sovereignty and national security. These agreements broadly reflect the language, values and worldview of the United Nations’ global mass migration project. Sections of the Foreign Affairs Manual revised during the Biden years to incorporate those priorities must be reviewed.

The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) was not formally ratified but was symbolically endorsed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in December 2021 following Biden’s executive actions to re-engage with UN frameworks. The seven-page document on the State Department website articulates the Biden administration’s “reinvigorated dedication to many of the GCM’s objectives” and emphasizes “national values” that “align closely with those reflected in the GCM.”

Stated objectives of Blinken’s GCM endorsement include: to “support humane migration,” to “encourage full participation by migrants, including refugees, in our civic life,” and to provide “improved access to information about our immigration system and available options for protection and relief.” The Blinken endorsement foresees pathways to citizenship for millions of illegal entrants, and it seeks to ensure “that no person is deemed ‘illegal,’ or referred to in other derogatory terms.”

The GCM’s commitment to “support humane migration” is contrary to U.S. immigration law, national security interests and foreign policy goals. Although the U.S. can withdraw support from the GCM without a formal exit process, removing traces of its objectives from the Foreign Affairs Manual is necessary.

Multilateral agreements and partnerships entered into during the Biden years

Blinken’s GCM endorsement called illegal border crossing “an inherently transnational phenomenon that no State can or should address alone.” While the endorsement of the GCM is not legally binding on the U.S., vestiges of several additional agreements entered into by the Biden administration that sprang from the GCM’s vision may remain in effect.

• The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, adopted in 2022 at the Summit of the Americas, is a regional agreement signed by 22 countries to promote cooperation on transnational migration in the Western Hemisphere. Trump’s funding cuts to USRAP, PRM and USAID programs in Central America signal rejection of the Declaration, but there has been no formal withdrawal. Although the Declaration is non-binding, it spurred additional cooperative agreements and 11 “action package committees” to implement its goals.

• Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) Agreements, negotiated by the U.S. bilaterally with Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Ecuador, were designed to deter illegal human border crossing — not through robust border enforcement, but by exploiting “lawful pathways” for migrants who did not qualify for refugee status.

• The Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants (R4V), jointly led by UNHCR and IOM, is a coalition of 200+ stakeholder organizations (including UN agencies, civil society groups, faith-based organizations and NGOs) that coordinate in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. PRM has been a major annual donor and participant. U.S. financial support to R4V in 2019 ($174 million) and in 2020 (~$500 million) was focused on assisting Venezuelans in host countries outside the U.S. But the Biden administration, linking its R4V support to the Los Angeles Declaration, amplified contributions and shifted its emphasis away from regional resettlement, encouraging the Venezuelan diaspora to reach the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies has documented how the R4V network uses these resources to promote and facilitate illegal migration.

Evidence of the Biden administration’s objectives for USRAP can be found in two Refugee Admissions Project reports issued in 2020 by the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, produced under the supervision of Antony Blinken. These Penn Biden Center reports (archived here and here) aimed at expanding PRM and increasing refugee admissions to 125,000 annually, but they offered no explanation of who those refugees would be, why they would need refugee status (notwithstanding those “forcibly displaced by climate”), or how the authors arrived at the 125,000 number. With no attention given to vetting concerns, it’s clear that the initiative was intended to reverse measures taken by the previous Trump administration and to “reassert global leadership on refugee protection” — without considering whether expanding refugee admissions would benefit the United States.

The UN International Organization for Migration (IOM)

While both IOM and UNHCR agencies coordinate the R4V network, IOM‘s presence on the migration trail is more visible. Nothing illustrates the seamless nature of the relationship between the Biden administration and the IOM more clearly than the selection in October 2023 of Amy Pope, then President Biden’s Senior Advisor on Migration, to the office of Director General for IOM. The mission of the IOM is to promote migration, not to prevent it: IOM “is committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society.” In a 2023 interview Pope said she views “migration” as “not a question of whether people move; it’s a question of how they move and whether we, as international actors, can build out ways for them to move.” She cited “climate” as her top priority as IOM director general: “millions of people [are] displaced each year as a result of climate impacts, and we know that hundreds of millions more live in extremely climate vulnerable communities.”

According to her IOM bio, Director General Pope has a “passion for changing the global narrative about people on the move” ^__ and that passion is reflected in the language used by both IOM and PRM to blur the legal distinction between bona fide refugees and illegal migrants in order to absorb massive numbers of undocumented economic migrants into the United States under the pretense that they were asylum-seeking refugees. Biden’s State Department turned over to IOM the operation of major U.S. government initiatives related to migration and refugee resettlement, including management of the no-interest Refugee Travel Loan program. These transfers to Geneva have enabled Amy Pope and U.S.-funded IOM activities to evade Congressional oversight.

The Foreign Affairs Manual

President Trump’s Executive Order 14211 of February 12, 2025, “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations,” declares that an “exceptional workforce of patriots” is needed to effectively implement the President’s foreign policy, and that “[f]ailure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation” of foreign service officers. The order also calls for reforming the foreign service and for revising or replacing the State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual.

An understanding of how the UN redefines key terms and invents new terms and concepts related to illegal immigration is necessary in order to undo the damage of the prior administration. For example, IOM’s Orwellian 248-page Glossary on Migration relabels illegal entry as irregular migration, which it defines as: “the act of crossing borders without complying with all the legal and administrative requirements for entry into the [country].” Reframing illegal border-crossing as “irregular migration” and supporting it by ushering migrants through “lawful pathways” to somehow turn illegal border-crossing into “regular migration” is linguistic sleight-of-hand that allowed the administration to confuse executive branch employees and the general public and to usurp Congress’ role in writing immigration law.

The Foreign Affairs Manual indicates that PRM’s Office of Multilateral and External Coordination “Plans, formulates, and directs the implementation of U.S. institutional relationships, governance, and strategies that address the full range of population, refugees, migration and other humanitarian issues in the UN system and in other multilateral organizations” and represents the United States on governing bodies of these organizations, including the UNHCR, IOM, and ICRC (1 FAM 523.4[1]).

PRM also houses the Office of International Migration, tasked with “coordinat[ing] international migration policy formulation and implementation in order to further the Department’s goal of promoting safe, orderly and humane migration” (1 FAM 523.6[1]), and the Office of Refugee Admissions which “formulates refugee admissions policy and programs for the U.S. government” (1 FAM 523.5[1]).

An archived version of an IOM website captured on February 3, 2024 illustrates the relationship between IOM and the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), revealing a detailed interactive graphic showing how IOM and USRAP worked together during the Biden years to bring hundreds of thousands of refugees to the United States. This number does not include the more than 1 million Afghans and Ukrainians paroled into the U.S. under separate policies — decisions made without regard for whether relocation of displaced Afghans or Ukrainians to the United States, rather than to safe countries closer to their places of origin, made any sense at all.

Migration infrastructure built during the Biden years must be addressed

Besides the formal refugee admissions and legally questionable parole programs, at least 6 million illegal migrants were allowed to enter the United States during the Biden era. In addition, at least 2 million (potentially many more) entered as “gotaways” while Border Patrol agents were busy “processing” illegal aliens into the country at the direction of DHS, leaving unguarded gaps in the border.

In October 2024, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies investigated migration at the Colombia-Panama border and found that the Clan del Golfo, the most violent and powerful criminal organization in Colombia, maintained complete control over the area and all migration routes. Bensman found that R4V network members including Colombian government agencies, banks, and NGOs “collaborate with Clan del Golfo in an organized manner to profit from migrants crossing through the Darién Gap en route to the southern border of the U.S.”

Later that month Bensman brought back drone video footage of the construction in southern Mexico of a “75,000 square-foot mega-mall, built to enable industrial-scale illegal immigration to the U.S. southern border.” This new structure complements the “permanent network of way stations for thousands of miles along the migration routes from South America to the U.S. border” that Bensman and others have documented.

Michael Yon has reported extensively on the migrant camps in Panama that sprang up in 2021, and he has shown how migrants from China and elsewhere around the globe were provided shelter, charter buses and other services. A March 2025 report from Michael Yon in Panama — the geographic chokepoint for northward-bound migration from South America — reveals that a road is now being constructed through the Darién jungle, possibly funded through a partnership with China. Yon has also reported the IOM and some NGO offices and camps in Panama remain open for business.

Conclusion

In a March 2024 address to the Council on Foreign Relations, Amy Pope noted “we rarely see migration policy embedded in foreign policy. And frankly, that’s where it better belongs.” Clearly, removing harmful pro-migration policy the Biden administration “embedded” into the Foreign Affairs Manual and other documents must be a top priority for Trump 2.0.

In addition to curtailing USRAP and cutting NGO funding, President Trump and his State Department must take decisive action to withdraw all U.S. resources from “migration” programs and to rescind agreements between PRM and the organizations that pushed millions of undocumented economic migrants to our borders, shores and airports during the Biden years. The State Department must carefully remove UN language from the Foreign Affairs Manual and relevant policy documents. Moreover, the Trump administration must remain vigilant and maintain strong diplomatic partnerships with Panama, Mexico and throughout Latin America to ensure the network of NGOs, criminal organizations, and other entities that exploited and exacerbated the migration crisis is fully dissolved.