The Death of US Refugee Resettlement

And what you can do about it

In the middle of one of the wildest news weeks in modern times, with breaking news about Trump’s tariffs and Musk’s hostile takeover of USAID just this morning, I’ve seen almost no national reporting on the executive orders that effectively ended the US Refugee Admissions Program. But the loss of this program is catastrophic. It will drastically affect hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the world over the next four years.

Until 2017, the US led the world in refugee resettlement, and losing the program will have massive, global implications for displaced people and our ally haven countries (like Jordan and Turkey for Syria, or India and Thailand for Myanmar). More people are displaced because of violence and war now than at any other time in history—the number grows every year. In 2024, UNHCR reported that 122.6 million people, or 1.5% of the world’s population, had been forced to flee their home; 43.7 million of them are recognized as refugees. The Biden administration aimed to resettle 125,000 refugees in 2025; that’s a lot after the first Trump administration decimated the program, but it’s a drop in the bucket of the profound global need.

The numbers of people affected by the executive orders are also alarming: 10,000 flights were cancelled after Trump signed the first executive order on January 20. With the January 24 stop work order, more than 30,000 resettled refugees who arrived after October 1 lost critical Reception and Placement support. Most resettled refugees get three months of support and they have to pay the US government back for their plane tickets. It’s ludicrous and impossible. Losing even that little bit of help leaves tens of thousands of vulnerable people on the edge of homelessness, and resettlement agencies cratering. It will be weeks or months before we fully understand the full scope of what just happened.

I could go on and on naming the number of people whose futures were just destroyed by these orders.

In a matter of days, the Trump administration intentionally targeted what remained of the resettlement program that was the dream of both Presidents Carter and Reagan, that was fully supported by every single president, both Republican and Democrat, since 1980. The US refugee resettlement program was a public-private, bipartisan, faith-based-government partnership the likes of which we might never see again in our country.

The numbers aren’t enough, though. Something is lost to the US when we no longer care about refugees, an inextricable quality to US culture that should deeply concern us all. In my first book, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, I wrote: “refugee resettlement is a bellwether of our country’s moral center—how we respond to the greatest humanitarian crises of our time reveals our nation’s soul.”

I believe that now more than ever.

What will always be the most gut-wrenching part are the families who survive unimaginable persecution and war, only to have their lives irrevocably, generationally altered with the stroke of a president’s pen.

---

Hasna, the former refugee I featured in After the Last Border, and Amina, who was our interpreter came, to our house with their family five days after Christmas. It was a beautiful day spent with friends who have become like family. Our very first interview was eight years ago, around Christmas time. In December, we lamented the fact that—almost a decade later—she is stuck in the same horrific situation.

Once again, Hasna’s children and grandchildren who were on their way to the US through the resettlement program have been banned by the Trump administration.

Since I can’t show their faces, this is us holding hands from one of our interviews.

Hasna arrived in the US in July 2016 with her husband, who was permanently disabled by a missile strike, and her youngest daughter, Rana (all the names are pseudonyms). Hasna and her family lived in Daraa, Syria when the civil war began and she eventually fled across the border into Jordan. The story of how some of her children made it to safety, and others did not—and what happened to their spacious, jasmine-lined, coffee-fragranced home—is the subject of the book. All these years later, their story breaks my heart anew every time we’re together. It’s enough to say, she could not return to Syria without being killed. Even now, weeks after Syria is free, it is still too dangerous for her family members to go back.

She and her husband made an impossible choice after years of agonizing: they chose refugee resettlement. They endured grueling interviews and interminable waits and finally, after years of intense vetting, proved to the US government in 2016 that they would be persecuted or killed if they returned home and needed a new place for their family to settle.

Like every refugee I’ve ever met, Hasna chose resettlement in the US not because she was trying to game the system but because the choice was either death or a new country. The US promised every step of the way that her children and grandchildren could join her. She did not want to come to the US; to this day, this is not her first choice. She would give anything in her life to be able to wake up in her home in Daraa with her children and grandchildren nearby.

Instead, she came over with her husband and youngest daughter so the entire family could find a place to finally be free and live together.

And then, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2017, President Trump signed a Muslim Ban immediately preventing anyone from seven different countries from arriving in the US—including Hasna’s Syrian children and grandchildren. A few weeks later, one of her daughters, Amal, was rerouted with her family to Canada.

For the next several months, the rest of the family spread out, each of them seeking safety. A brother and sister remain together in Europe. And one family—her son Khassem, his wife and three kids—are still stuck as refugees in Jordan.

This past December, Amal came from Canada with her four kids to visit her parents. Her son, Mohammad, is ten and an old soul with big eyes and a grave expression. He thanked me profusely and specifically for everything: the food was some of the best food he’d ever eaten. The small presents I got were his favorite things. Eating lunch at my house was one of the best days of his life, he told me seriously and often.

My family found his constant enthusiasm delightful—everything we did was pretty low key. We had paper plates and off-brand Sprite and played with bubbles and chalk we found in the garage. What made it special was the company, the impossible ability to finally be together.

It was one of those warm days in an Austin winter that we get tired of, but that feel miraculous when you’re coming from the north. The Syrian-Canadian snowbirds reveled in being outside.

While the kids had the best day of Mohammad’s life, the adults lingered on the porch and talked about two subjects over and over—the fact Syria is now free, and none of us could believe it. And what the incoming Trump administration meant for Hasna their son and brother, Khassem, and his wife and kids in Jordan.

The entire time that Hasna has been in the US, her son Khassem and his family have been stuck in Jordan. But after years of trying, they were in the process of being resettled in Austin. They were supposed to arrive through WelcomeCorps, the private sponsorship program that was new under the Biden administration. My family and our church were going to sponsor them. We filled out the many, many, many forms and got background-checked ourselves. We fundraised $15,000—rent in Austin is not cheap. We’ve been working towards this for most of the year.

We were ready. It was all done. And then Trump was elected.

Eight years ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hasna learned in horror that Amal’s family, along with her other kids and grandkids, would not be able to join her. In December, we already knew an incoming Trump admnistration would prevent her son from coming.

We were right. Again on Holocaust Remembrance Day, on January 27, 2025, the Trump administration’s executive order went into effect and this time all refugees—including Khassem and his little family—were banned.

I know the big picture matters, that there are tens of thousands of people immediately affected. But my heart is with my beloved friend, whose family has been separated again and again and again by war and authoritarianism and prejudice and hatred and lies and ridiculous policy changes that go against every presidential administration’s policies since 1980.

All Hasna wants is to be with her family.

That December lunch, as we lingered over coffee on the porch, listening to the kids play and witnessing their joy at being together, I was struck again: people speak about refugees as if they’re a news topic or an issue.

But they’re just people.

Refugees are Amal, whose face shone from the joy of being with her parents again after so many years apart, who is an excellent teacher, who is no less fierce for being thoughtful and contained, who loves her husband so well and is raising her kids to be thoughtful and kind and appreciative.

Refugees are her smart older daughters, who love anything related to science and who write long, newsy WhatsApp texts to my own STEM-loving girls.

Refugees are Mohammad, who gazed around the entire day in joy and wonder and thanked me for the smallest, most insignificant things.

Refugees are the toddler, their family’s little miracle born in Canada whose laughter is a shaft of sunlight in the bleakness of a new life in a cold place away from everyone they know and love.

Refugees are Hasna, sitting on that back porch with the friends who have become her sisters, soaking in what should have been a commonplace afternoon spent with her kids and grandkids all around her.

Refugees are Khassem, and his wife and three kids, who cannot work in Jordan without a permit that is prohibitively expensive, who cannot return to Syria because there are still people who would kill them on sight. And now, who now cannot come to the US despite years and years and years of doing everything right. Who are permanently, horrifically stuck.

Refugees, who want the most basic things I take for granted all the time: the ability to be safe, to be free, and to be with family.

That’s what it means to be a refugee.

---

We Are All America hosted several refugee groups at a webinar on Friday that was immensely helpful. The groups outlined the scope of what happened in the first two weeks of the Trump administration and what it means.

Here’s the timeline and what you need to know:

• On January 20, Trump signed an Executive Order called “Realigning the US Refugee Admissions Program.” The order indefinitely suspended the USRAP; flights were supposed to be cancelled on the effective date, January 27, but they started cancelling them the very next day.

• On January 24, resettlement agencies received a “stop work” order to cease administering Reception and Placement for resettled refugees and Afghan Special Immigrant Visas (our allies who helped the US in Afghanistan). Effective immediately, they could not provide:

  • Rent

  • Food

  • Clothes

  • Furnishing

  • Transportation training and assistance

  • Medical aid

  • Educational enrollment

  • Cultural orientation

  • Language learning

  • Or anything else

• On January 25, the State Department cancelled Afghan SIV bookings—breaking our country’s process to the people who served our nation and interests in Afghanistan and condemning them to death or persecution

• On January 28, the administration froze all federal grants and loans, meaning any other federal assistance agencies might be able to rely on through other programs was also cut off. Though that is being challenged in courts, what that freeze means is still very much up in the air.

What this means for agencies:

• Refugee agencies are on the brink of collapse; many barely held on during the last Trump administration (others did not—Refugee Services of Texas, my own local and beloved agency, could not ultimately survive and the loss is heartrending).

• Many caseworkers are themselves former refugees. They’re helping vulnerable populations while worried about their own family and community members, unsure if they have a job, frantic that their loved ones will be in increased danger either in their home countries, haven countries, or here in the US.

• No one is in resettlement for the money. If caseworkers and other staff at resettlement agencies are not former refugees, they care deeply about the people they work with. Many have already lost their jobs; many more will lose them.

What this means for refugees abroad:

• It’s no exaggeration to say many hundreds or even thousands will die.

• The end to US foreign aid (the losses keep piling up) means that refugees in camps in Thailand just lost their only health insurance, among thousands of examples.

• Refugees flee because of war and persecution, and many will return home with no other option. Many will be killed. It’s as simple as that.

• The average time displaced people spend in a camp or another protracted refugee situation is 26 years. That will only get worse.

• Without options for viable income or a way to survive, starvation, trafficking, and violence will increase. Haven countries grow weary of supporting them. There will be increased persecution everywhere they turn.

• What this means for displaced people including refugees is incalculable.

What it means for former refugees here:

• Newly resettled refugees who just got their support cut off are on the brink of homelessness.

• Many former refugees will not be reunited with their families—including, I heard, a child separated as a baby who is now seven.

• They will lose the agencies that served as their only safe communities in a bewildering new place.

• They’re afraid of deportation (they shouldn’t be), violence (they should be), and racialized persecution here in the US (they should be).

I could go on, but I’ll stop. What this means is so awful, we’ve never seen anything like it in our country.

What you can do:

• Support your local resettlement agencies. PAY THEM MONEY, they need financial help. Call or email them to ask what specific needs they have, and be ready to organize to collectively help them.

• Not sure where to give? Feel free to help refugees in Texas at what is now my local agency, World Relief, which took over after Refugee Services of Texas after it folded, or GirlForward, one of my favorite programs in the world.

• Join Refugee Advocacy Lab’s United in Welcome campaign to contact officials today.

• Join “Together We Rise,” We Are All America’s National Week of Action February 10-17, 2025. More details coming ASAP, so watch that space.

Share in the comments how to help agencies near you. Call your officials. Protest, letter write, GIVE MONEY, and above all, do not stop caring about refugees.

The grief is profound, but we cannot let it stop us from acting now on behalf of people made doubly vulnerable—by war and persecution, and then by Trump’s horrific anti-refugee policies.

---

As for Hasna’s family, we don’t know the answers yet. It looks like Khassem will stay in Jordan for now and some of the fundraised money we got to help them in the US we used to get him the work license he needs there. But it’s a short-term solution.

All he wants is to be with his family and for his wife and kids to be OK. All any refugee wants is a place to be safe and be free. At one time, we were proud for that place to be the United States.

Now, we’ve lost our moral center—and it says something terrible about our nation’s soul.

---

Tomorrow, Alejandra will write about what is happening with immigration in Chicago.