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.
