Lawsuit targeting Trump's refugee ban to go before federal judge in Seattle

Update notice, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025 at 12:53 p.m.: A federal judge in Seattle has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing refugee arrivals and funding. Read more about the decision here.

A legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing refugee arrivals and funding is scheduled for a hearing before U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead in Seattle on Tuesday. Individual plaintiffs along with three nonprofits serving refugees are asking the court to put the order on hold while the case proceeds.

It’s the second major federal immigration case to become tied up in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington since Trump retook office last month. The first concerns Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.

David Duea is the CEO of Lutheran Community Services Northwest, one of the plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit. He said the extent of Trump's executive order regarding refugee arrivals came as a shock.

“We knew it would taper down and we were prepared for that. No one was prepared for this really unethical and inhumane direct stop," he said.

Duea said the nonprofits haven't been paid for the 90 days of assistance they provide each new refugee, even though those refugees arrived before the order was issued. The are currently 300 people in the region entitled to that help, he added.

“We’re still providing those services and the government has told us we won’t get paid for those, even though we have a contract and a moral obligation to these refugees," Duea said.

RELATED: Seattle judge blocks Trump order to end birthright citizenship — again

Plaintiffs filed their lawsuit on Feb. 10. They argue the sweeping order signed on Trump’s first day in office goes far beyond his efforts to constrain refugee arrivals in his first term. It has suspended all refugee admissions and processing indefinitely, and “stopped federal funding of the organizations that have served refugees for decades, crippling their ability to provide resettlement services.”

Trump's executive order titled Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program called the refugee admissions program "detrimental to the interests of the United States," and said, “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees.”

The lawsuit challenging that order said the lead plaintiff, referred to by the name Pacito, “is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who was approved for resettlement to the United States and scheduled to travel with his family on January 22, 2025, before their travel was abruptly canceled. Pacito and his family currently reside in Nairobi, Kenya.” (The lawsuit said plaintiffs seek anonymity due to the harms they and their families could face if their participation in the lawsuit becomes public.)

Pacito was scheduled to travel on January 22 with his wife and baby and had sold all of the family’s possessions and given up their rental house in preparation, according to the lawsuit. He then learned that their travel had been canceled.

More broadly, the lawsuit claims that refugees affected by Trump’s order now face “ongoing, serious, and irreparable harms.”

The Trump administration’s motion to deny the preliminary injunction said the harms asserted by refugees and their advocates “are greatly outweighed by the harm to the government and public interest that would result from an order taking the unprecedented step of enjoining the President from exercising his Constitutional and statutory power over the admission of refugees.”

The three faith-based organizations leading the lawsuit are Church World Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (described as the American Jewish community’s global refugee organization), and Lutheran Community Services Northwest.

The lawsuit is playing out in the same courthouse where Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson made headlines in 2017 when he successfully challenged Trump’s earliest order targeting refugees. Trump attacked U.S. District Judge James Robart’s granting of a temporary restraining order in that case as “ridiculous,” describing Robart, a George W. Bush appointee, as a “so-called judge.”

That refugee order was later rescinded — the White House put forward various versions of the order that year in response to legal challenges. All of them tried to block refugees from certain majority-Muslim countries for specific timeframes.

The latest lawsuit states the current executive order bars entry for all refugees for an indefinite period of time.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has also sued over the latest order, on Feb. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The complaint in the Seattle case said the numbers of refugees entering the U.S. have varied greatly in recent decades.

“In late 2024, President Joe Biden set the refugee admissions goal for fiscal year 2025 at 125,000 refugees, as he had done for the prior three fiscal year,” it reads. Historically, the President has set the refugee admissions goal as high as 240,000 (in 1980, the year Congress passed the Refugee Act) and as low as 15,000 (at the end of the first Trump Administration).”