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Disability Wiki

Immigration and Refugees

This page is about disabled people who migrate — immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people. It leads with what disabled migrants build and lead, then gives honest context about the barriers they navigate.

A note on scope and numbers: some material here is U.S.-specific (public charge, Section 504) and some is global (prevalence, the UN CRPD); we flag which is which. Population figures are mostly modeled estimates, because disability data on displaced people is poor — we say so.

Leadership and community first

Section titled “Leadership and community first”

Disabled migrants are organizers, caregivers, artists, and neighbors — not just people things happen to.

  • The disability justice movement was co-founded by disabled people of color, including Stacey Park Milbern, a Korean American queer disabled activist who built mutual-aid networks (sourcing generators, medication, and supplies for disabled neighbors during California power shutoffs).
  • Disabled organizers run multilingual “know your rights” trainings and mutual aid for immigrant communities — for example at Access Living in Chicago and Detroit Disability Power.
  • Refugee-led, by and for disabled people: refugee-with-disabilities-led groups have partnered with UNHCR to advise humanitarian agencies on accessibility — “nothing about us without us” in practice.
  • Disabled refugees lead at the policy level too, directing disability-inclusion programs at organizations like the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).

Disability is made at the border, not just brought to it

Section titled “Disability is made at the border, not just brought to it”

War, torture, trauma, and the physical journey itself can cause lasting impairments and psychological disability. Detention can create or worsen disability through prolonged stress and the absence of accommodation. Framing disability as something migrants simply “bring with them” misses how borders, conflict, and confinement produce it.

The “public charge” history (U.S.)

Section titled “The “public charge” history (U.S.)”

U.S. immigration law has excluded disabled people for well over a century:

  • The term “public charge” enters U.S. law in 1882; the 1891 Act explicitly added disabled people. These exclusions were tied directly to the eugenics movement.
  • As late as the 1980s, U.S. law barred dozens of categories of immigrants, including people with intellectual disabilities and mental illness.
  • This history is still live. The operative rule is DHS’s 2022 public-charge final rule (effective December 2022), which does not treat disability — or use of Medicaid home- and community-based services — as a negative factor. But on November 17, 2025, DHS issued a proposed rule to rescind it and count a disability or chronic health condition (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, PTSD, and others) as a negative — a heavily weighted negative for anyone without private insurance to cover the costs. That 2025 proposal was not yet final as of this writing, so the protective 2022 rule still governs; but because this area is volatile and changes with each administration, check a current source (e.g., the National Immigration Law Center) for the rule in force before relying on anything here.

Detention, access, and rights

Section titled “Detention, access, and rights”
  • In the U.S., Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act requires accommodations and effective communication for disabled people in immigration detention and immigration court. DHS’s own Section 504 regulations (6 CFR Part 15) cover its detention programs, and Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder (2013) established competency safeguards — including appointed representatives — for detained immigrants with serious mental disabilities. Enforcement is inconsistent.
  • Language and disability barriers compound. Someone who is both disabled and has limited English faces stacked obstacles in asylum systems that are hard to navigate even for those who don’t.
  • Globally, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), Article 11, requires states to protect disabled people in conflict, emergencies, and disasters, and the CRPD Committee has criticized migration “health requirements” as discriminatory. (Note: the U.S. has signed but not ratified the CRPD.)

Organizations and resources

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Contribute to This Page

Section titled “Contribute to This Page”

This page especially needs the expertise and stories of disabled immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. If you can strengthen or correct it — or help keep the fast-changing legal details current — see How to Contribute.