The 'golden door' is 'closed': US won't admit persecuted Christian refugees in 2026, report warns
WASHINGTON — The United States is on track to admit zero Christians fleeing from the world's worst countries for persecution in fiscal year 2026, according to a new report from the global watchdog Open Doors and the Evangelical refugee resettlement agency World Relief.
The organizations unveiled their new report Thursday at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, documenting the state of Christian persecution worldwide and the number of refugees admitted into the U.S.
The release comes one month before the Trump administration is set to determine the number of refugees to be admitted to the country in fiscal year 2027, which begins Oct. 1.
“The U.S. has essentially taken this golden door and closed it,” asserted World Relief CEO Myal Greene at Thursday’s event.
The report, titled “State of the Golden Door: Evaluating U.S. Refugee Resettlement and Asylum in Light of Global Christian Persecution,” states that the number of refugee admissions from the 50 countries on the 2026 Open Doors World Watch List had plummeted to zero in fiscal year 2026, which concludes at the end of the month.
While the report primarily focused on persecuted Christians, it acknowledged that the halt on refugee resettlement during the Trump administration has applied to all religious minorities in those countries, not just Christians.
“Only three refugees were resettled from a country on the Open Doors World Watch List, and those individuals were not religious minorities," the report states. "We can conclude with a high degree of confidence that in FY2026, no refugees experiencing religious persecution will be resettled in the U.S."
The report is critical of President Donald Trump’s designation of an “invasion” at the southern border, his halting of all refugee resettlement in a January 2025 executive order and the administration’s implementation of guidance encouraging enforcement officials to “remove any noncitizens attempting to enter either at or between ports of entry even if they were attempting to seek asylum.”
Although refugees have been admitted to the U.S. in fiscal year 2026, the Trump administration has prioritized the resettlement of white South Africans whom it describes as “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”Statistics in the report reveal that the asylum approval rate for countries on the World Watch List decreased from 58% in fiscal year 2023 to 10% in fiscal year 2026.
As fiscal year 2026 is on track to be the first year in at least a quarter century when not a single Christian refugee was admitted to the U.S., Open Doors estimates that 388 million Christians faced persecution worldwide — one out of every seven Christians around the globe.
Open Doors CEO Ryan Brown said “the breadth of persecution” and “the depth of persecution” against Christians have increased.
Specific examples of Christian persecution mentioned by Brown include Sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen a “continued surge in the ways that violence is characterizing the ways that persecution is being experienced by Christians on the ground there,” as well as the advancement of “digital surveillance” at “exponential rates” in countries such as China, where “the church is being monitored and technology is being used as a tool to create harm and displacement.”
The actions of the Trump administration as they relate to refugees and asylum seekers come as part of an effort to prioritize border security.
In an interview with The Christian Post, Brown lamented that “one of the things that has become confused in the discourse and the dialogue, especially with Christians, is these issues of border security, these issues of … folks fleeing for economic reasons or those types of opportunities that the U.S. seems to uniquely afford them.”
“That’s not what this report’s talking about," he said.
“This report is specifically talking about those individuals that have a reasonable fear for their life and their safety because of their Christian faith and identity,” Brown added. “Throughout the Church history … the Holy Spirit has used people having to leave because of persecution to bring the Gospel and to … spark revival in different places around the globe.”
Brown urged Christians to “prayerfully consider those things to try to just separate those issues that often seem to convolute issues of border security, issues of folks chasing economic opportunity and look at this issue of Christian persecution and those being forced to flee persecution on its own merits.”
He doesn't believe expanding refugee resettlement will endanger the border security the Trump administration has prioritized.
“Often when we engage these conversations, we can do so with this trepidation that there … are floodgates of individuals that … if we open the door a crack … that it’s going to be overflowing with … folks that are coming in," Brown said. "That is traditionally not the case.”
Brown characterized asylum seekers as “a relatively small number of people” who “truly have no other options,” insisting that “these are thousands of cases” as opposed to “millions of cases.”
Looking ahead to fiscal year 2027, Greene maintained that he is not "optimistic to expect a significant reversal of the policy.”
“That said, we’re people of faith, and we’re committed to being faithful in our advocacy and being consistent in bringing these causes to light,” he vowed. “We wouldn’t be issuing this report if we didn’t believe that there are Christians and people close to the administration who have a deep desire to see these policy changes and what that entails.”
World Relief Vice President of Advocacy and Policy Matthew Soerens expressed hope that Trump would reimplement the policy of his first administration, where the president made “individuals who are fleeing religious persecution a priority within the refugee determination in 2019.”
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