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Middle powers, this is your moment to stand up for migrants

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by Ian M. Kysel, opinion contributor - 05/13/26 12:00 PM ET

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by Ian M. Kysel, opinion contributor - 05/13/26 12:00 PM ET

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FILE – Ukrainian refugees wait near the U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico, April 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)

Last week, as leaders gathered in New York for the United Nations’ International Migration Review Forum, the backdrop was more consequential than the agenda. Trump’s immigration crackdown continues daily.

On Monday, the Trump administration rejected the forum and its output, in another blow to migration multilateralism. But after European leaders refused to join Trump’s war in Iran, a new dynamic may be emerging: middle powers saying “no.”

In the wake of the forum, held every four years to review the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, middle powers should extend their resolve to migration.

What can other countries do to stand up for migrants and prevent a race to the bottom on rights? Canada’s Mark Carney’s call at Davos for countries to join together against a formerly reliable partner that has abandoned multilateral cooperation sparked debate worldwide.

How could new forms of solidarity be asserted? Most importantly, governments must make the sovereign argument when refusing to implement Trump administration requests that violate international law protecting migrants, including to rewrite refugee law and diminish its protections. The strongest reason for refusal is grounded in national interest.

Since 2020, the protection of migrant rights in national law has increased in parallel to the implementation of the compact. Forty of 45 major host countries protect migrants against return to persecution or torture, according to recent research, based on the Migrant Rights Database. Defending legal protections is not deference to global idealism, but an expression of values baked into national law. When saying no, governments can tell Washington: “Our laws protect migrants. We are not changing or breaking them.”

The past year has seen migration control wielded by the administration as a cudgel to the rule of law. It is hard to overstate the impact on lives.

Consider the case of “Jalil”, an asylum-seeker referenced in court filings. He fled Afghanistan with his siblings, arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2025 just as the new Trump administration was invoking a migrant “invasion” to justify ending asylum at the border. He is a musician from a country where his music has been banned.

Jalil and his siblings had been scheduled by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection One app to present their asylum case, but they were denied sanctuary. The last thing he said to his siblings as they crossed the U.S. border was, “There is nothing to be afraid of, we are all safe.” Instead, Jalil was returned to Afghanistan, and his siblings were sent to detention in Costa Rica and Panama.

Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia just ruled that the law enacted by Congress does not allow blanket suspension of the entry of all asylum-seekers. As U.S. judges push back, so should allies. But governments should issue more than polite refusals. Two underused legal tools could help.

First, middle powers can support human rights courts and commissions. There are myriad challenges to U.S. policies sending migrants to detention in countries with which they had no ties now pending in human rights commissions. I have worked on many of these cases alongside the Global Strategic Litigation Council, including challenging indefinite detention in Eswatini and enforced disappearances and torture in El Salvador.

States could publicly affirm support for rights — and U.S. responsibilities — in these egregious cases. They could also band together and seek advisory opinions from regional human rights courts about the legality of border externalization practices. Affirming the rights baseline could provide a touchstone for refusal to cooperate on mass deportations.

Second, governments can demand compensation when their citizens are mistreated by the U.S. authorities. Such claims rest on firm legal grounds the U.S. helped establish. To take one example, the U.S. secured reparation for a migrant, W.H. Argall, detained and flogged with straps in Guatemala in 1895.

The use of the practice, diplomatic protection, has declined significantly. Ukraine or Haiti, for instance, could invoke the interests of nationals for revoking humanitarian parole or temporary protected status without adequate process. A group of governments bringing coordinated damage claims following the mistreatment&