DHS Unleashes ICE Authority Under 1-Year Refugee Rule

For years, the one-year refugee adjustment requirement existed in federal statute with more theory than enforcement.

Refugees admitted to the United States are required to apply for lawful permanent resident status after one year. The law says they “shall” return or be returned for inspection and examination. In practice, however, that deadline often functioned more like a compliance expectation than a custody trigger.

On Feb. 18, DHS changed that.

In a new memorandum, the Department of Homeland Security directed USCIS and ICE to treat the one-year mark as a mandatory re-vetting checkpoint. The administration’s position is direct: Refugee admission is conditional. Adjustment after one year is required. If that step does not occur, DHS must enforce the statute.

The directive, dated Feb. 18 and submitted by government lawyers in a federal court filing that remains sealed, instructs ICE to detain refugees who entered the U.S. lawfully but who have not obtained permanent residency — also known as green card — a year after their admission. pic.twitter.com/vwGPdRkB5x
— Camilo Montoya-Galvez (@camiloreports) February 19, 2026

The memo states:

DHS must treat the one-year mark as a mandatory re-vetting point for all refugees who have not adjusted to LPR status, ensuring either that they are scheduled to ‘return’ to custody for inspection or, if they do not comply, that they be ‘returned’ to custody through enforcement action.

That language is not advisory; it is operational.

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Under prior ICE guidance from 2010, failure to obtain lawful permanent resident status “by itself” was not treated as a proper basis for detention. That policy has now been formally rescinded. In its place, DHS has tied the one-year statutory requirement directly to custody authority.

The mechanics are straightforward:

The refugee must return, or be returned, to Department of Homeland Security custody for inspection and examination for admission as an LPR.

If the return is not voluntary, the memo leaves no ambiguity:

If the refugee does not voluntarily return, DHS will return the individual to custody (i.e., arrest and detain) for this purpose.

The directive also clarifies that inspection detention is not confined to a brief administrative hold:

Detention pursuant to INA § 209(a)(1), 8 U.S.C. § 1159(a)(1), is not indefinite, but it is also not limited to merely 48 hours. Instead, it may last for the reasonable length of time it takes to inspect and examine the alien to determine whether he or she is admissible.

Taken together, the memo converts the one-year deadline into an enforceable checkpoint backed by arrest authority.

DHS argues that this shift is data-driven.

According to the memorandum, a USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security review examined 31,000 refugees admitted from Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela between 2021 and 2024. The findings were not minor.

10% had evidence of public safety concerns, including gang membership, that were not addressed.

That figure alone challenges the assumption that the one-year inspection requirement was redundant.

But the broader issue, according to DHS, involved incomplete screening and identity verification failures.

Over 42% had been insufficiently vetted to determine whether they presented a public safety concern due to an inability to fully verify identity.

In other words, in a substantial share of cases, the government could not conclusively verify who it was adjusting to permanent status. And when DHS stepped back and evaluated the full sample, the result was even more sobering:

Less than 47% could be conclusively found to not represent a public safety concern.

DHS’s argument is that the statutory reinspection requirement was not being implemented with the seriousness Congress intended.

The statute says refugees “shall” return or be returned for inspection at the one-year mark. That language has always been there. What changed is the enforcement posture.

If 10 percent of reviewed cases carried unresolved public safety concerns and more than 42 percent could not be fully vetted for identity, then treating the one-year rule as functionally optional was difficult to defend.

This memo does not create a new immigration category. It operationalizes an existing condition of admission, converting what had become a procedural deadline into a statutory checkpoint backed by custody authority.

ICE is not being handed a new law. It is being directed to execute the one Congress already wrote.

Editor’s Note: Democrats are fanning the flames and raising the rhetoric by comparing ICE to the Gestapo, fascists, and secret police.

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