by Ben Whedon
The Trump administration on Tuesday highlighted data showing a 96% drop in legal immigration from Muslim-majority nations since 2024.
The administration’s Rapid Response 47 account shared a chart from the CATO Institute, a pro-immigration, libertarian-leaning think tank that used State Department data.
The development saw immigrant and refugee administrations from those countries drop from 18,000 in January 2025, to fewer than 500 last month.
Some Republicans have increasingly advocated for closer scrutiny of Islamic immigration amid the war in Iran and the longer-term conflicts in the region.
Homegrown Islamic terror threats have also prompted calls to curb immigration from countries with known terrorist activities and recent Office of the Inspector General data has shown that vetting failed to flag threats from 40% of Afghan asylum seekers admitted in 2021 amid the collapse of the pro-U.S. government in that country.
During the Trump administration, it has tried to bring in more white South Africans. During the first 10 months of Fiscal Year 2026, America admitted 10,258 refugees, with most of them being white South Africans, according to Pew Research.Â
“The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its ‘undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests,” Trump said in a February 2025 executive order about resettling white South Africans.
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Ben Whedon is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
