DHS Unleashes ICE Authority Under 1-Year Refugee Rule – RedState
For years, the one-year accommodation requirement for refugees existed in federal law, with more theory than application.
Refugees admitted to the United States must apply for lawful permanent resident status after one year. The law says they “shall” return or be returned for inspection and review. In practice, however, this delay often functioned more as an expectation of compliance than as a custody trigger.
On February 18, DHS changed that.
In a new memorandum, the Department of Homeland Security directed USCIS and ICE to consider the one-year deadline as a mandatory review checkpoint. The administration’s position is direct: the admission of refugees is conditional. An adjustment after one year is necessary. If this step does not occur, DHS must enforce the law.
The directive, dated Feb. 18 and submitted by government lawyers in a federal court filing that remains sealed, directs ICE to detain refugees who entered the U.S. legally but have not been granted permanent residency — also known as a green card — one year after their admission. pic.twitter.com/vwGPdRkB5x
– Camilo Montoya-Galvez (@camiloreports) February 19, 2026
The memo states:
DHS should treat the one-year time limit as a mandatory checkpoint for all refugees who have not adjusted to LPR status, ensuring that they are either scheduled to “return” to detention for inspection or, if they do not comply, that they are “returned” to detention through enforcement actions.
This language is not advisory; it is operational.
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Under previous ICE guidance from 2010, failure to obtain lawful permanent resident status “per se” was not considered good cause for detention. This policy has now been officially rescinded. Instead, DHS tied the one-year statutory requirement directly to the custodial authority.
The mechanics are simple:
The refugee must return, or be returned, to the custody of the Department of Homeland Security for inspection and examination for admission as an LPR.
If the return is not voluntary, the note leaves no ambiguity:
If the refugee does not return voluntarily, DHS will detain (i.e., arrest and detain) the refugee for this purpose.
The directive also specifies that detention for control is not limited to brief administrative detention:
Detention under INA § 209(a)(1), 8 USC § 1159(a)(1), is not indefinite, but neither is it limited to 48 hours. Instead, it may last for the reasonable time necessary to inspect and examine the alien to determine if he or she is admissible.
Overall, the memo converts the one-year time limit into an enforceable checkpoint supported by the arresting authority.
DHS says this change is driven by data.
According to the memorandum, a USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security study examined 31,000 admitted refugees from Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela between 2021 and 2024. The findings were not minor.
10% had evidence of public safety issues, including gang membership, that were not addressed.
This figure alone calls into question the assumption that the one-year inspection requirement was redundant.
But the broader problem, according to DHS, involved incomplete screening and identity verification failures.
More than 42% had not been adequately vetted to determine whether they presented a public safety concern due to the inability to fully verify their identity.
In other words, in a significant share of cases, the government could not conclusively verify who it wanted to get permanent status. And when DHS took a step back and evaluated the full sample, the result was even more disappointing:
It was concluded that less than 47% does not represent a public safety problem.
DHS’s argument is that the legal requirement for reinspection has not been implemented with the seriousness desired by Congress.
The statute states that refugees “shall” return or be sent back for inspection after one year. This language has always been there. What has changed is the law enforcement posture.
If 10 percent of the cases reviewed involved unresolved public safety issues and the identities of more than 42 percent could not be fully verified, then it was difficult to defend the one-year rule as functionally optional.
This memo does not create a new immigration category. It operationalizes an existing admission condition, transforming what had become a procedural deadline into a legal checkpoint supported by the custodial authority.
ICE is not getting a new law. He is ordered to carry out what Congress has already written.
Editor’s note: Democrats are fanning the flames and raising the pitch by comparing ICE to the Gestapo, fascists and the secret police.
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