---
title: "Trump’s Latest Pocket Rescission Cancels $810 Million Meant for Refugees and Immigrants"
description: "Congress voted the money on a bipartisan basis; the fiscal year ends September 30 and the House is out of session"
author: "Inez Holloway"
published: 2026-09-26T18:29:13.628Z
modified: 2026-09-26T21:06:48Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/trump-s-latest-pocket-rescission-cancels-810-million-meant-f-967bb6
language: en
tags: ["trump", "congress", "immigration", "budget", "law", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Trump’s Latest Pocket Rescission Cancels $810 Million Meant for Refugees and Immigrants

*Congress voted the money on a bipartisan basis; the fiscal year ends September 30 and the House is out of session*

By Inez Holloway · September 26, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/trump-s-latest-pocket-rescission-cancels-810-million-meant-f-967bb6

## In brief

- The administration is moving to cancel $810 million in congressionally appropriated funds via a pocket rescission
- Congress has 45 days to act, but the fiscal year ends September 30, effectively canceling the money
- The largest cut is $567 million from the HHS account funding Office of Refugee Resettlement programs
- Collins called the move a clear violation of law; the GAO says the pocket rescission maneuver is illegal
- Trump’s first pocket rescission last year canceled $4.9 billion in foreign aid, the first in nearly 50 years

There are five days left in the federal fiscal year, and the House is out of session through the November election. That is the arithmetic the White House chose. On Friday it announced that President Trump is moving to cancel $810 million in spending Congress had already appropriated, according to a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget — “another nearly $1 billion,” in the language of the White House’s own release, of what it called “the most harmful government spending.”

The instrument is a pocket rescission, and its logic is the calendar. The package of proposed cuts went from the president to House Speaker Mike Johnson in a notification letter, covering the Departments of Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, and Justice. Once a rescission is submitted, the funds freeze, and Congress has 45 days to act. The fiscal year ends September 30. The 45 days do not exist, and so the money, in effect, ceases to. The Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, has said the maneuver is illegal.

The largest single cut, $567 million, comes out of the Refugee and Entrant Assistance account, which funds Office of Refugee Resettlement programs under HHS. The administration’s argument is that the office is “overfunded,” given that the president’s border policies have curbed crossings; refugees, CNN notes, ordinarily enter the country after extensive background checks through a network of non-government organizations working with the State Department. Also in the package: $15 million from the Alternatives to Detention Case Management Pilot Program, which serves people under ICE supervision who are not detained — “unnecessary and wasteful spending” — and $10 million from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services grant program that helps lawful permanent residents learn English and American history on the way to citizenship, a program DHS, the letter said, “has already paused,” its previously awarded grants canceled.

Ten million dollars of the Minority Business Development Agency’s $50 million was rescinded as money appropriated for what the letter called “unconstitutional race-based purposes.” “The MBDA grant programs direct grants to businesses based on race,” the letter said. “Divisive and discriminatory programs are at the core mission of MBDA, which is why the FY 2027 Budget request proposed to eliminate the agency.” The rest of the list reads as a map of things the administration prefers not to exist: an Education Department program for migrant students, a Justice Department office focused on reducing racial tensions, housing counseling at HUD, $70 million for what the White House called “woke” international education programs, $28 million in HHS research grants, and $9 million in debt relief for foreign countries that fund climate change policies. The White House release took care to note that some of the affected organizations are led by people who worked in the Obama administration.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine — a Republican, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and in a difficult reelection campaign — said the action came without warning or consultation. On X she wrote that it “shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law.” “Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” she wrote, pledging to work with colleagues to address “these illegal actions,” which she called the latest attempt to undermine Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, called pocket rescissions “an illegal line item veto” and asked his Republican colleagues to imagine a Democratic president with the same tool. “He is canceling the lines of spending he doesn’t like,” Merkley said. “This violates the core separation of powers embedded in our constitution in which it is the Congress, not the president, who decides what programs are designed and at what level they are funded.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on Appropriations, described the action as “theft from the American people, plain and simple” — funds cut off, she said, by “a president more focused on building a ballroom than investing in families,” while tax dollars pay for advertisements promoting him. Democrats, she noted, tried in recent spending negotiations to write in language barring exactly this, and Republicans declined.

The precedent is not old. Last year Mr. Trump used the first pocket rescission in nearly fifty years to cancel $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid; the Supreme Court declined to block it, the president’s authority over foreign affairs weighing heavily in the decision. This year’s rescission is domestic. Before either of them, the instrument had last surfaced in 1977, when Jimmy Carter proposed a rescission well ahead of the 45-day deadline and then withdrew it himself — a sequence the current administration cites as evidence the tool is legal. The White House describes all of this as the use of “long-neglected Presidential authorities.” It sits alongside the fired federal workers, the historic rise in tariffs, and the war in Iran begun without Congress — part of [the year’s long argument over federal money](https://rews.cc/a/counting-the-money-that-never-came-177-billion-in-federal-gr-c40a1a) and over who, constitutionally, gets to say where it goes, with the courts left to draw the line.

> OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.

## Sources

- [Trump administration cancels $810m in refugee and immigrant funding](https://cnn.com/2026/09/26/politics/trump-administrion-pocket-rescissions) — cnn.com
- [Trump cancels nearly $1 billion in Congress-approved spending](https://latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-09-25/trump-claws-back-nearly-1-billion-in-funding) — latimes.com