In 2012, thousands of Syrian refugees began arriving in Jordan as a result of the Syrian Civil War. Refugee crises are generally predicted to strain services and potentially raise the threat of state-directed social action at the local level (Zhou 2019; Chambers 1986). Yet municipalities closest to the Syrian border have not crumbled under the pressures of hosting an additional population. Instead, many municipalities have embarked on development projects, and mayors touted their increased power and relationships with international actors during my interviews in 2018 and 2019. Simultaneously, mayors in municipalities with fewer refugees reported feeling neglected and struggling to meet constituent needs. What explains this divergent situation? How do local elected officials respond to refugee crises? Recent research has examined the utilization of refugees by developing state governments as a tool to bargain for political concessions and economic assistance on the international stage (Kelberer 2017; Tsourapas 2019). Yet there is limited research on the effects of refugee crises and international aid on political dynamics at the subnational level (Betts et. al 2017). I argue that in Jordan mayors actively utilize refugee presences to obtain fiscal assistance from international sources and achieve their policy objectives. I theorize that refugee presences disrupt existing distributive dynamics between local governments and the central state by introducing an additional actor—the international community—into the service provision landscape. I argue that assistance during refugee crises is distinct from development assistance, which is often coopted or redirected spatially by the central state, due to the threat of social unrest by citizens in refugee-hosting areas. Instead, humanitarian assistance becomes directly subject to the local politics of refugee-hosting municipalities and the agendas of mayors and local elites—whether corrupt or aimed at improving service provision. Simultaneously, aid allocation towards refugee-dense municipalities has bred resentment and an effort by mayors in less refugee-dense municipalities to inflate refugee presences to also extract assistance. To test my theory, I use process-tracing through more than 40 interviews with Jordanian mayors, central government officials, and international assistance providers, a quantitative dataset, and secondary source analysis over five months of fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. My research demonstrates the transformation of Syrian refugees into bargaining chips in both refugee-dense and refugee-scarce municipalities, and the transformation of spatial power relationships in a developing refugee-hosting country. By doing so, it fills a gap in the literature on the behavior of subnational actors during refugee crises.