The Iran war is still in its early days. Our operations against the Iranian regime have so far been swift and apparently devastating.
But those who remember Iraq know that Saddam Hussein’s conventional forces were destroyed in very quick order by U.S. troops in 2003. The trouble came afterward. Our attempts to stabilize the country, root out terrorists, and prop up an American-friendly regime bogged down into one of the “forever wars” Donald Trump campaigned against during the 2016 election cycle.
Our wars (sorry, “authorized armed conflicts”) in the Middle East didn’t bring us victory, but they did bring us a stream of “refugees” from the same Third World cesspits we were trying (and failing) to reform into proper nations.
We don’t know how the Iran War will end. It could be over in a few weeks, or it could be over by September. Or by September 2036. Regardless of how long it lasts or how devastating it is for Iran, we absolutely cannot take a single “refugee” from this conflict.
According to the Trump administration, we have no intention of bringing over any refugees from this latest conflict in the Middle East.
“It’s safe to say there’s no plan for a wave of new Middle Eastern refugees to the United States of America,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said to The Federalist’s Breccan Thies on Thursday.
“The president has pointed out for a long time, there are a lot of countries in the region who would be capable of providing that kind of support if need be. But that’s certainly not something we’re planning on,” he added.
That certainly seems like an encouraging answer, especially after decades of previous administrations doing the exact opposite. But, there’s a catch; one that should keep Americans on guard.
The administration has been light on details on what it has and has not planned in this war. We weren’t even told that the war itself was planned. We can’t even get a straight answer on what our objective is, whether there will be boots on the ground, what kind of retaliatory strikes we can expect from Iran, or whether this is even a war at all.
In fact, it seems like plans might already be changing. Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social that the U.S. would offer asylum to Iran’s National Women’s Soccer Team if Australia refuses to do so.
“Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake by allowing the Iran National Woman’s Soccer team to be forced back to Iran, where they will most likely be killed. Don’t do it, Mr. Prime Minister, give ASYLUM. The U.S. will take them if you won’t,” he wrote.
There’s a lot we, the American public, don’t know right now. And we don’t know if the administration will change its mind on refugees if or when Iranian regime change happens. But we do know that recent foreign wars the U.S. has been entangled in resulted in a massive influx of people from those war-torn countries.
According to Census Bureau data compiled from 2016-2020, an estimated 131,619 Afghans lived in this country, the majority of whom were relocated to the states during the war in Afghanistan. And that number ballooned after President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal in 2021. Another approximately 150,000 resettled in the United States from August 2021 to August 2024, during which Biden launched Operation Allies Welcome. That program gave more than 70,000 Afghans “immigration parole” to enter the U.S. As of January 2025, there were reportedly around 40,000 Afghans around the world actively seeking to come here. Nearly 15,000 Afghans arrived in the U.S. in fiscal year 2024, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report.
And how did our Afghan “allies” repay our efforts to evacuate them in the aftermath of their country’s fall to the Taliban in 2021? By trashing the military bases they were temporarily housed in. According to a December 2022 report by the Department of Defense’s inspector general, military bases that hosted Afghans as part of Operation Allies Welcome suffered nearly $260 million in damages. Security personnel at one of the bases, Fort Pickett in Virginia, said that there were “few repercussions” for Afghans who committed felonies.
Another inspector general report from DHS in 2022 found that the Biden administration had failed to properly vet refugees we took in, remarking that the administration “did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees.”
“We attribute the challenges to DHS not having: (1) a list of Afghan evacuees who were unable to provide sufficient identification documents; (2) a contingency plan to support similar emergency situations; and (3) standardized policies,” the report concluded.
Afghan refugees continue to repay our generosity with brutal criminal acts. One such “ally” who entered the U.S. in 2021, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was charged in the shooting of two West Virginia National Guardsmen in November during President Donald Trump’s operation to bring order to our nation’s capital. One of the guardsmen died of her wounds. A recent DHS sweep nabbed Afghan nationals accused or convicted of a litany of crimes ranging from ISIS involvement to lascivious acts with a minor.
According to a five-year Census Bureau estimate from 2016-2020 data, 153,964 Iraqis lived in this country, the majority of whom seem to have been admitted into the U.S as refugees from the Iraq War.
Numbers vary even among government agencies. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported that roughly 85,000 Iraqis were admitted to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013. Meanwhile, the State Department claims that between 2006 and 2014, 103,000 Iraqis were admitted for resettlement. An additional 52,601 Iraqis arrived between 2014 and 2023, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. In total, approximately 150,000 Iraqis arrived in the U.S. from 2008 to 2023, the agency reported.
We began taking in Somali refugees in the midst of its long-running civil war, but resettlement didn’t ramp up until after the infamous Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. The engagement between U.N. forces and Somalian insurgents resulted in 18 U.S. deaths. United Nations data shows the tiny Somali immigrant population in the United States, around 2,500 in 1990, “had grown to between 140,000 and 150,000 by 2015,” according to Pew Research. An estimated 111,000 Somalians arrived in the U.S. between 2001 and 2023. The Census Bureau estimated 166,000 Somalis in the country based on 2020-2024 data.
And the chaos caused by our 2011 intervention in Libya caused a wave of refugees to Europe that still plagues that continent. Even without boots on the ground, our military exploits in the Muslim world produce waves of refugees that tend to end up in our country or that of an ally.
That’s how we got cities like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, which have been overrun with foreign peoples due to the consequences of our meddling in far-off regions of the world. The Somali fraud scandal and the hostile attitude the leaders of Dearborn seem to hold against anything Christian or American show what they really think of us and how much they respect our country (not at all).
These people flood in, concentrate into politically influential interest groups, and then begin making demands on their host. That’s how we end up with anti-American zealots like Ilhan Omar representing U.S. citizens in Washington.
Allowing zero refugees to resettle on American soil should be the absolute minimum requirement for any U.S. military action in the Middle East. It would be a great betrayal of the American people if the Trump administration begins allowing Iranian refugees to come here, especially since the administration has already said that it has “no plan” to. But plans can change. Just ask Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden about their adventures in the Middle East. The best laid plans (or lack thereof) rarely survive contact with the enemy.
Seven U.S. soldiers have already not survived contact with the enemy in Iran. It would be terrible for them to have died just for us to bring over a few million more Muslim “refugees.”
Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel
