The Trump administration on Tuesday published a rule that speeds up the process for terminating a refugee's status, allowing the rare revocation to happen in as little as 10 days. The final rule takes effect Wednesday and, in a move that procedural purists might call "skipping a step," was published without going through the formal notice and comment period.

Currently, refugees facing status revocation get 30 days to appeal. The new rule trims that to 10 - because nothing says "fair hearing" like a deadline shorter than a Costco return window.

"These families did everything asked of them. They submitted to interviews, background checks, and years of waiting abroad, only setting foot on U.S. soil once government officials approved their applications," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, a refugee resettlement group. "Now DHS wants to revisit those decisions on a ten-day clock, a notice period wholly insufficient to find a lawyer, translate documents, or get records out of a country they were forced to flee due to conflict or persecution."

"In some cases, refugees may not even receive the notice before their ten days are up, effectively eliminating their only chance to respond," she added. "If the government's case for termination is truly strong, it can afford to give people a meaningful chance to challenge it."

The move follows the administration's November order to review all refugees admitted under former President Biden. The rule cites Biden's refugee screening policy as its rationale, arguing that "the priority of expediency over quality encouraged a lack of robust interviews."

DHS wrote that "certain questions to ensure that aliens were eligible for refugee status prior to admission to the United States were omitted and this increased the risk of ineligible aliens being approved for refugee classification and subsequently admitted to the United States." The department added that "the goal was to have as many refugees as practicable enter the United States to meet President Biden's ceiling for refugee admissions and in order to accomplish this, a number of requirements for ensuring a thorough examination and assessment of eligibility were reduced or removed."

Upon taking office, Trump initially shuttered the refugee program, then reopened admissions with the lowest-ever refugee cap in history, largely limiting the process to white South Africans.

"The release of this new policy marks a new low, in a parade of lows, in this administration's ongoing effort to make permanent protection for refugees in this country a thing of the past," said Naomi Steinberg of HIAS, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

"First, the administration shuttered refugee admissions. Now, they are trying to upend the core principle that refugee resettlement represents permanent protection," Steinberg continued. "If this policy is allowed to go into effect, America can no longer claim to be the place of refuge and hope that it once was."

"Stripping away the security promised to refugees, and with little to no procedural safeguards, shatters our promise to them and sends a devastating message to both refugees and their persecutors alike: that even the most lawful and carefully vetted path to protection in the United States can be arbitrarily revoked," she added.

Refugees are among the most vetted immigrants to come to the U.S., often spending years in refugee camps and undergoing multiple rounds of interviews and screenings. Their status can only be revoked if it's found they wouldn't have qualified for the program in the first place.

Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, said the rule could hit Afghans especially hard - some 30,000 Afghan refugees came to the U.S. between 2022 and 2025.

"Ten days is not due process for the Afghans who stood with us. It is a deadline built to be missed," VanDiver said. "If the government believes a specific person lied, it already has the tools to prove it. The 30-day window has stood since 1980, through administrations of both parties. DHS concedes in its own rule that it cannot quantify a single benefit from shortening it."

He added: "The rule does not cite one Afghan case to justify the change. Yet Afghan allies will carry its weight."