Faith groups say they'll help refugees despite Trump order. But they'll need help.
Afghan refugees hold placards during a meeting to discuss their situation after President Donald Trump paused U.S. refugee programs, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday, Jan. 24, 2025. When the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021, it carried tens of thousands of Afghans to safety. But years later, many others are still waiting to be resettled. Those are Afghans who helped the war effort by working with the U.S. government and military or Afghan journalists and aid workers whose former work puts them at risk under the Taliban. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)
Bob Smietana, Yonat Shimron, and Jack Jenkins
(RNS) — Jalil Dawood, pastor of the Arabic Church of Dallas, thanks God every day for the U.S. government’s refugee resettlement program, which helped him settle in the United States after he fled persecution during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Dawood, who said the program reflects the best of American values, believes he has President Ronald Reagan to thank for helping to change the course of his life.
“Ronald Reagan helped me make it to America,” Dawood said.
On Friday, (Jan. 24) the Trump administration halted the current resettlement program for refugees, who are legal immigrants who have been vetted by the government, many of them after awaiting resettlement for years. A previous order put a stop to all new arrivals of refugees for the next 90 days.
That is a mistake, said Dawood, an evangelical Christian who holds graduate degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He voted for Donald Trump three times.
Dawood, founder of World Refugee Care, a small Texas nonprofit that provides spiritual and humanitarian support for refugees in the United States and the Middle East, said he understands the president’s concerns about national security. But the refugee resettlement program is not a danger, he said. Instead, it’s a way for the United States to help religious minorities and others facing persecution around the world.
“There a lot of persecuted Christians,” said Dawood, whose group does not receive any federal funds. Saying he believes the Bible tells Christians to be compassionate to refugees, he added, “There is a real need, and America needs to bless those people, bring them in or help them so they might start a new life,” he said. “God will bless America for that. And that’s my concern.”
Since the start of the federal fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2024, more than 32,000 refugees have arrived in the United States, as well as an additional 10,000 Afghans with special visas. They are all entitled to 90 days of housing and other basic support to help them resettle in the United States, find employment and enroll their children in school.
Danilo Zak, director of policy at Church World Service, a faith-based refugee resettlement agency that contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees, said that in the week before Trump’s inauguration alone, more than 5,000 refugees and 1,000 Afghans on Special Immigrant Visas were resettled across the country.
The administration then canceled flights that were supposed to bring in refugees before the Jan. 27 pause. Then it ordered a halt to all assistance for those already here.
“That’s just cruel and heartless,” said the Rev. Randy Carter, pastor of Temple Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, and the interim director of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina’s Welcome Network, which provides temporary housing to refugees and others. “They’re telling them not to treat them anymore as clients, not to spend more to assist them getting resettled into the United States.”
Carter said he plans to encourage the 60 or so churches in the Welcome Network to make a grant to the refugee agencies it works with to supplement whatever funds the government may be abruptly ending.
Matt Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, said that faith-based refugee resettlement groups, including World Relief, had expected Trump to put limits on the number of refugees allowed in the United States, as he did in his first term. Those past limits led resettlement groups to lay off staff and close offices, essentially crippling the public-private partnerships that make resettlement work in the United States.
Faith-based refugee agencies operating in the U.S. ramped up their efforts to assist as many refugees as possible before Trump returned to office, fearing he would eliminate the refugee program. But Soerens said World Relief and other groups were caught off guard on Friday by a federal memo instructing them to stop working with refugees already in the United States.
World Relief and other refugee resettlement groups, including Catholic Charities, Church World Service and HIAS, receive federal funding to help refugees. They also raise funds from private donors to assist refugees and recruit volunteers from houses of worship.
That volunteer work will continue, said Soerens, who also said that volunteers and private donations will be needed now more than ever. “I don’t think that the government has any authority to tell us, or any church, don’t bring your refugee friends to the grocery store,” he said. “Or don’t help them go to their medical appointments.”
Ben Marsh, pastor of First Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said his church has no plans to stop its volunteer work with refugees, which includes support groups for refugee families.
“We’re still going to meet with our families and love them,” he said.
What the federal government can do, Soerens said, is to cut off funding for the initial part of the resettlement process. That may mean refugees won’t be able to pay rent, and resettlement groups may have to lay off staff.
The president has unilateral authority to set the ceiling on refugee admissions each year. President Biden’s announced target was 125,000 refugees for the current fiscal year, as it was each of the three prior years.
Although refugee resettlement has been a controversial issue over the past decade and a half, World Relief’s work with refugee resettlement has been active ever since it started in the 1970s, when Grady and Evelyn Mangham, former Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries to Vietnam, organized to assist refugees fleeing the fallout from the end of the Vietnam War. Church groups welcomed refugees to places such as Nashville, Minneapolis, Chicago — including the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan, young men who had been separated from their families during Sudan’s civil war — and other cities for years.
In 2007, Ann Corcoran, a conservative activist, began a blog called Refugee Resettlement Watch, which was critical of refugee resettlement groups. That blog spurred a large movement to ban Muslim refugees in particular, claiming they wanted to impose Shariah law in the U.S. That eventually morphed into a broader anti-immigrant movement that came to view faith groups that aid immigrants or refugees with suspicion.
That anti-immigrant sentiment became part of Trump’s pursuit of the White House, which peaked during the 2024 campaign with false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating local pets.
This past weekend, Vice President J.D. Vance accused Catholic bishops of putting their own financial concerns ahead of national security, citing the government funds Catholic Charities, the Catholic Church’s humanitarian arm, has received to assist migrants at the border.
“I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns?” he told “Meet the Press,” mischaracterizing refugees’ presence in the U.S. as illegal. “Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”
Faith-based groups that resettle refugees —who are legal immigrants —have faced similar criticism.
Dawood said that Christian critics of the refugee program might want to go back to the Bible to read its passages about welcoming refugees, and, citing his hero, Ronald Reagan, said, “America is the city on a hill, and America is to be honored and blessed by accepting those refugees.”
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