Evelyn was a teenager when Hurricane Mitch crashed into Honduras in 1998, killing 7,000 people and destroying her family’s home. “There were bodies and dead animals floating in the water, the house was messed up, the furniture was all gone – doors, windows gone. It was so, so sad,” she said. Her relatives in New York City urged her mother to bring her and her sister to the U.S. “My uncle and aunt were just like, ‘OK, just bring the kids over here, don’t stay. It’s dangerous,’” she recalled.
Evelyn, who did not want to share her full name, now lives in New York and has two daughters, one studying to be a lawyer and the other a doctor. But she said the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has made it far harder for people in similar situations to flee to the U.S. now. “Every day it’s more barriers,” she said. “It’s sad to know that people will not be able to apply for a status or something to help their situation and also help the people back home.”
A Guardian analysis of data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative found that 22 of the 39 countries from which the Trump administration has fully or partly restricted entry rank within the most vulnerable quarter of nations to climate impacts. “Nearly all of the most vulnerable countries are on a ban or visa pause,” said Danielle Wood, an associate professor at Notre Dame. Immigrants from Chad and Niger, the two most climate-vulnerable countries according to the index, are now fully barred from the U.S., as are people from Sudan, Somalia and Sierra Leone.
The administration has also sought to terminate the Temporary Protected Status of people from Honduras and 12 other countries who already reside in the U.S., with nearly half of these countries ranked by Notre Dame as among the most climate-vulnerable places in the world. The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering an appeal to the TPS revocation for people from Syria and Haiti, which have suffered recent droughts and hurricanes, respectively.
A doctor from Sudan, who did not want to be named, said he moved to the U.S. several years ago but now faces the prospect of deportation under a new administration edict that has blocked all entry from Sudan and dozens of other countries. A severe drought in Sudan has worsened a fierce civil war, he said. “People have had to abandon their lands because there isn’t enough water, millions have fled,” he said. “There is climate change and the difficulty of people sharing resources and the conflicts are affected by that.”
A man from Somalia, now applying for asylum in the U.S., described drought conditions in his country. “People from the farming lands, they’re dying, with no water,” he said. “Also the animals, they die because when it’s not raining, everything will dry, people die, animals die, and all the people they run from the farm and come to the city.” After being forced to Mogadishu, he said he came to fear for his life due to armed groups and now faces new fears in the U.S. after the administration effectively shut down the asylum system.
“Now we are getting a lot of attacks from the government,” the man said. “I don’t know why. I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s scary with the government here, how they are treating people.”
People uprooted from countries like Sudan and Somalia now face an almost impossible situation in terms of entry to the U.S., according to Felipe Navarro, associate director of policy and advocacy at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. “If you were displaced by climate change, that door is closed,” he said. “I don’t think climate displacement comes into the administration’s thinking; it’s probably not intentional. They just have a general hatred for certain nationalities and races. This administration doesn’t really care about climate change at all.”
The United Nations estimates that severe heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods have displaced 250 million people globally over the past decade, the equivalent of 70,000 displacements every day. In 2025, nearly 30 million people were forced by disasters to move within their countries, recent figures show. Wildfires, such as those that incinerated parts of Los Angeles last year, were the largest cause of such displacement.
Neither U.S. law nor the UN’s 1951 refugee convention recognizes environmental disasters as a reason to gain protection in another country. “People are being displaced by climate change, the number is growing every year and, increasingly, the displacements are permanent,” said Jocelyn Perry, program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International.
Advocates say people will typically be displaced by a climate-fueled disaster, which leads to a separate but related misfortune, such as violence, that spurs them to leave their country. War or persecution can, unlike climate change, be used as a reason to claim asylum. “Climate change is not necessarily the first issue that displaced people raise,” said Perry. “But if, say, a family’s crops fail for three years and they have to move to an urban area and they can’t find work or it’s dangerous there, climate change has played a key role in their movement – even if their asylum claim is because of the violence that follows.”
The U.S. is the world’s largest emitter of planet-heating pollution in history. However, Trump has dismissed any need to act on the climate crisis, which he calls a “hoax” and “bullshit,” and has demanded the world remain wedded to fossil fuels. The administration has effectively shut down the U.S. refugee program, other than to white South Africans, and dismantled overseas aid that ameliorates the symptoms of a warming world.
“All of these actions will increase displacement, and the Trump administration will try to dissuade people from coming to the U.S. border through cruel and inhumane policies, third-country deportation and child detention,” said Perry. “I don’t know if that will deter people if the other option is risking death or injury at home, though, so people will still make that journey.”
The one part of the U.S. immigration apparatus that does factor in the climate crisis is TPS, by which foreign nationals already in the U.S. are granted renewable one- or two-year stays if war or natural disaster hits their homeland. Syrians were granted TPS in 2024 on the basis, among other things, of falling wheat production and “drought-like conditions.” Ethiopia has been hit by severe drought and flooding, displacing more than 4 million people, the country’s TPS status from the same year concluded, while about 350,000 Haitians in the U.S. would risk returning to one of the countries “most affected by extreme weather events,” according to a 2023 determination granting a TPS extension.
The Trump administration has terminated TPS status for a swathe of countries, however, with the courts set to decide on the status of several of these, including the Supreme Court case involving Syria and Haiti. “There are tens of thousands of people who have fled because of natural disasters,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, a lawyer representing six plaintiffs from Haiti, which has been hit by two huge hurricanes since 2016. “Haiti has been smack dab in the middle of this for decades.”
Efforts to update the U.S. immigration system to include consideration of the climate crisis have so far floundered. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act defines a “refugee” as anyone who is unable to return to their home nation due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political viewpoint. It does not include protections for those displaced by environmental degradation.
In 2021 and 2023, Democratic lawmakers aimed to codify such a change with the Climate Displaced Persons Act, which would amend the INA to provide durable legal status and resettlement support to people forced to relocate to the U.S. due to climate disasters. “As disasters supercharged by climate change cause disruption and devastation around the world, the Trump administration wants to both destroy programs meant to build more resilient countries and make it impossible for those without recourse to seek refuge in the United States,” said Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who introduced the proposal both times.
Given the current political environment, however, the prospect of a new climate migration framework appears dim. “I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of optimism right now that any change could occur anytime in the near future,” Perry said. Amid a broader push for mass deportations by the administration, “climate has been put on the back burner to safeguard the very concept of regular migration as a whole,” she added.
A future administration could try to implement a sort of climate visa to the U.S., but it’s more likely that it would focus on limiting damage around the world that displaces people in the first place, according to Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. “If the tide was to turn, it might be more for adaptation funding to help people stay where they are, rather than a new visa,” Schacher said. “We have our own displacement in the U.S., too – we aren’t immune from this. Right now the sympathy for immigrants, even people displaced by the worst persecution, is nil. It’s hard to see any sort of expansive opening – up, even if that’s what people need.”