Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.
As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.
Of the 39 countries from which the Trump administration has fully or partly restricted entry to the US, 22 are ranked within the most vulnerable quarter of nations in the world to climate impacts, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, which assesses how prone jurisdictions are to the climate crisis.
“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 in the world according to the index, are now fully barred from the US, as are people from Sudan, Somalia and Sierra Leone, also among the 10 countries most exposed to climate impacts.
Among the most vulnerable half of countries is Honduras, which has seen stronger rainstorms, droughts, floods and coastal erosion in recent years. When Hurricane Mitch crashed into the country, killing 7,000 people, one affected family surveyed the unsalvageable ruins of their home and realized they had a lifeline – to move to the US.
Evelyn, who did not want to share her full name, was a teenager when Mitch hit in 1998 and recalls how her relatives in New York City pleaded with her mother to bring her and her sister to the US.
“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,” said Evelyn. “I got sick because of the mosquitoes too. My uncle and aunt were just like: ‘OK, just bring the kids over here, don’t stay. It’s dangerous.’”
Storms of the deadly ferocity of Mitch are even more likely today because our atmosphere and oceans have rapidly heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Yet Trump’s curbing of immigration and asylum has made it far harder for people like Evelyn to flee to the US. “Every day it’s more barriers,” said Evelyn, who still lives in New York and has two daughters, both studying at university. “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.”
The administration has also sought to terminate the temporary protected status (TPS) of people from Honduras and 12 other countries who already reside in the US, with nearly half of these countries ranked by Notre Dame as among the most climate-vulnerable places in the world.
The US supreme court is now considering an appeal to the TPS revocation for people hailing from two of the affected countries: Syria and Haiti, which have suffered recent droughts and hurricanes, respectively, as well as violent unrest. Environmental perils in these and other countries have been cited by the federal government when granting TPS status to allow people to remain in the US.
But the current administration’s sweeping bans on entry to the US will “keep the radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” and resolve deficiencies in vetting people, Trump has said. The state department was contacted for comment about climate-related immigration.
Most of the banned countries are at the epicenter of an escalating climate displacement crisis, with the United Nations estimating severe heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods have uprooted 250 million people globally over the past decade, the equivalent of 70,000 displacements every day.
It’s unknown how many of these people flee over borders, with most migration taking place internally – 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.
But experts agree that there is a growing cohort of so-called “climate refugees” fleeing their home countries as the planet continues to dangerously overheat. There are currently no official pathways to do so, however, with neither US law nor the UN’s 1951 refugee convention recognizing 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. Residents of developing countries now blacklisted by the US struggle to deal with the loss of crops, sea level rise and other upheavals worsened by global heating, she added.
“A house in Florida may be able to withstand a category four hurricane, but there are people around the world unable to deal with that in any way and they are bearing the brunt of this,” said Perry.
Advocates say that 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 US 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.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has effectively shut down the US refugee program, other than to white South Africans, and dismantled overseas aid that ameliorates the symptoms of a warming world, such as the spread of disease. Cuts to USAID engineered by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, are forecast to result in the deaths of about 4.5 million young children, in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, over the next five years.
“All of these actions will increase displacement, and the Trump administration will try to dissuade people from coming to the US 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,” she added. “We are seeing political decisions in the US and in Europe, too, that will leave more people stuck in vulnerable places and unable to respond. With worsening climate change, this is going to be horrific for the rest of the world.”
The one part of the US immigration apparatus that does factor in the climate crisis is TPS, by which foreign nationals already in the US 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” that have plagued the country in recent years. 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 US 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.”
Even those still protected by TPS face uncertainty. A doctor originally from Sudan, who did not want to be named, said he left for the US after drought accelerated conflict in his country, which has been locked in a civil war for the past three years.
“It’s too dry, there’s not enough water, the lands were just left without anyone to cultivate them and millions have fled,” he said. “The conflicts are affected by climate change and the difficulty of people sharing resources in that part of the world. I did not see any hope in things improving.”
Sudan is still on the TPS list but only until October. “It would be very, very tough, very difficult to go back,” said the doctor, who has still not heard whether an application made for a work permit has been successful. “One of the reasons people come to the US is because they think there is a law, everybody is treated equally. But I think this is no longer the case.”
The supreme court ruling is expected by late June or early July.
Efforts to update the US immigration system to include consideration of the climate crisis have so far floundered. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) 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 – something researchers and advocates have long said is necessary. 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 US 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 the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, who introduced the proposal both times.
Such legislation is needed now more than ever, Markey said. “Trump’s attacks on foreign aid programs, his disregard of climate science and his attacks on immigrants all come from the same playbook,” he said.
The bill would also ensure that agencies collect data on climate-related displacement. That could remove a major roadblock to establishing and maintaining protections for those affected, said Hannah Flamm, deputy director of policy at the International Refugee Assistance Program (IRAP).
“There’s vast data globally on internal displacement on account of climate, but there’s virtually no data on international displacement on account of climate,” she said, adding that Markey’s proposal is a “valiant effort”.
“Whether or not it passes, it is critical to mobilize advocacy and to reinforce the need to meet this need,” she said.
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 US, 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 US, 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.”
Dharna Noor contributed additional reporting; Aliya Uteuova contributed data visuals
