By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
The Trump administration is highlighting a 96% decline in immigrant visas and refugee admissions from majority-Muslim countries since late 2024, reflecting a series of travel restrictions, refugee limits and visa-processing changes imposed since President Donald Trump returned to office.
The White House Rapid Response account publicized the decline Tuesday using an analysis of State Department data by the libertarian Cato Institute.
According to the Cato analysis, monthly immigrant visa issuances and permanent lawful refugee admissions involving nationals of 45 majority-Muslim countries declined from 21,096 in December 2024 to 808 in February 2026.
That represents a 96% reduction.
The figure is more precise than describing the change simply as a decline in “Muslim immigration.” State Department statistics generally identify nationality rather than religious affiliation, meaning the totals include Christians, Jews and members of other faiths from majority-Muslim countries while excluding Muslims who immigrate from countries where Islam is not the majority religion.
Cato found that immigrant visas alone fell approximately 95%, while monthly refugee admissions from the 45 countries declined from 5,157 in December 2024 to zero by February 2026.
Afghanistan accounted for the largest portion of the decrease. Monthly immigrant visas and refugee admissions involving Afghans dropped from 5,563 in December 2024 to nine in February 2026, a decline of 99.8%.
Pakistan recorded a 97.9% reduction.
Only Qatar, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates showed increases during the period examined by Cato, while Turkey experienced the smallest decline among countries where admissions fell.
The reduction was substantially greater than the decline involving countries outside the majority-Muslim group. Cato calculated that comparable legal immigration from other nations declined about 36%.
The administration has embraced the numbers as evidence that Trump’s immigration policies are producing their intended results.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also highlighted the decline, while administration officials have repeatedly argued that tighter screening and restrictions are necessary to protect national security and ensure adequate vetting.
Several executive actions contributed to the decline.
Trump suspended much of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program shortly after returning to office in January 2025, allowing only case-by-case exceptions deemed to be in the national interest.
Additional restrictions followed.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, the State Department fully suspended visa issuance for most nationals of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, while imposing partial restrictions on nationals from another group of countries.
The administration cited deficiencies in screening, information sharing, identity verification and national security safeguards.
The State Department then paused immigrant visa issuance in January for nationals of 75 countries while reviewing concerns involving screening and potential reliance on public benefits. That particular pause ended Aug. 21 following a federal court order, although other restrictions and screening measures remained in effect.
Cato calculated that 34 of the 45 majority-Muslim countries in its analysis were affected by either country-specific entry restrictions or visa suspensions.
The restrictions also extend beyond refugees.
Family-based immigration has been significantly affected, including visas for spouses, children and other relatives of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. Employment-based immigrant visas from the countries studied also declined.
Congress establishes most permanent immigration categories and numerical limits through federal law, while the executive branch has substantial authority over visa processing, admissibility, security screening and refugee admissions.
The changes therefore combine statutory immigration limits with executive actions that have reduced the number of visas actually issued.
One important limitation of the numbers is that they do not encompass every form of legal entry.
The analysis focuses on immigrant visas leading to permanent residence and permanent refugee admissions. It does not represent a complete count of temporary nonimmigrant programs such as H-1B specialty-worker visas, L-1 intracompany transfers, F-1 student visas or J-1 exchange visas.
It also does not count Muslim applicants based on religion.
That means, for example, Muslim nationals of India would not appear in a statistic limited to majority-Muslim countries even if they entered through employment, student or other legal immigration channels.
Estimates of the Muslim population in the United States also differ because the U.S. Census does not ask Americans their religion. A 2025 profile by Justice For All estimated the U.S. Muslim population at roughly 4 million.
The sharp immigration decline has generated markedly different reactions among Trump administration supporters and immigration advocates.
Noah Pollak, a senior adviser in the Trump administration who has served at the Department of Education and Treasury, connected the immigration restrictions to the administration’s campaign against antisemitism.
“This is the single most consequential policy to combat antisemitism in the US in the last decade and it’s not even close,” Pollak wrote.
“The Trump admin — and especially those like @StephenM who implemented it — will get no thanks or credit from legacy Jewish organizations,” he added.
Pollak’s assertion links immigration policy with antisemitism, but the immigration statistics themselves do not measure antisemitic attitudes or incidents and do not establish the religious beliefs of the individuals whose visas or refugee admissions were affected.
David Bier, the Cato immigration-policy analyst whose research produced the figures later promoted by the White House, has criticized the restrictions from the opposite direction.
“About 30% of these immigrants were not Muslim, but they hate Muslims so much that they don’t care if this harms Christians,” Bier wrote on X.
Cato’s underlying analysis found that among refugees from the 45 majority-Muslim countries between 2002 and 2024, approximately 28% were not Muslim and about 21% were Christian.
The State Department stopped reporting refugees’ religious affiliation in 2025, making it impossible to determine from current government statistics what share of the affected population belongs to any particular religion.
Bier has separately criticized the breadth of the restrictions, particularly their impact on family-based immigration and people who are not Muslim but hold citizenship in countries covered by the administration’s policies.
The dispute also reflects a much older political argument over immigration, assimilation, religion and national identity.
Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, immigration from parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia continues to be debated partly through the lens of national security.
The 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers and killed nearly 3,000 people. The perpetrators entered the United States through temporary visa categories, making their circumstances different from the immigrant visas and refugee admissions measured in the current 96% statistic.
U.S. policy toward immigrants and visitors from Muslim-majority countries has changed considerably across subsequent presidential administrations.
Former President George W. Bush publicly emphasized that the United States was not at war with Islam after the attacks. The Obama administration continued to emphasize religious pluralism and the place of Muslims in American civic life.
During a 2016 visit to a mosque, President Barack Obama said, “So let’s start with this fact: For more than 1,000 years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself Islam comes from salam, peace.”
Obama returned to the broader question of immigration and American identity during a 2025 conversation at the Jefferson Educational Society.
“[We] say, based on these ideals — we hold these truths to be self-evident…all men are created equal … and a constitution and a Bill of Rights and a democracy — that we can somehow figure out how to get along and maintain our private beliefs and pray to god in our own ways, and retain aspects of the cultures that we bring from wherever it is that we’re coming from, and yet still decide that we are all Americans … and try to make it better for each successive generation.”
“There’s never been an experiment like this, where you have people from every corner of the globe show up in one place,” Obama said.
The remarks were part of Obama’s argument that Americans of different backgrounds could maintain elements of their cultures and religions while sharing a common constitutional and national identity.
Critics of high immigration levels have taken a different view, arguing that rapid demographic change can make assimilation more difficult and increase cultural and political friction.
Some advocates of tighter immigration controls have pointed to Islamic theological discussions involving concepts sometimes translated as “loyalty and disavowal” and have circulated social-media examples as evidence of concerns about assimilation.
Such examples do not establish the beliefs or behavior of Muslim Americans generally, a population encompassing different nationalities, sects, political views and levels of religious observance.
Immigration has also become intertwined with partisan politics.
Muslim-American voting patterns have varied considerably by place and election, although Democrats have historically won substantial support in some large Muslim communities. Republicans, including Trump, have also made targeted efforts to increase their support among Muslim voters.
The immigration figures highlighted this week do not demonstrate that previous administrations expanded immigration for electoral purposes, nor do they measure the eventual political preferences of immigrants who become U.S. citizens.
What the data do establish is a dramatic change in the flow of people receiving immigrant visas or refugee admission from majority-Muslim countries.
Cato estimated that if the February 2026 pace continued through the remainder of the fiscal year, the United States would record its lowest combined level of immigrant visas and refugee admissions from those nations in at least three decades.
The decline is also part of a broader Trump administration effort to reduce immigration through multiple channels.
The administration has sharply curtailed illegal crossings at the southern border while imposing additional restrictions on refugee resettlement, immigrant visas, diversity visas and some employment-based programs.
In the case of the 45 majority-Muslim countries examined by Cato, however, the reduction has been considerably steeper than for the rest of the world.
That distinction — a 96% decline from December 2024 to February 2026 — is now being publicly promoted by the White House as one of the most significant measurable changes produced by Trump’s second-term immigration policy.
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