Congregations, agencies race to resettle refugees ahead of Trump inauguration

DURHAM (RNS) — At a quickly convened Zoom meeting in late November, members of Judea Reform Congregation summoned volunteers to form a team that would sponsor a refugee family before a January deadline.

That deadline is Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, when Donald Trump returns to the White House, after which the U.S. policy of admitting refugees is expected to be cut back, if not entirely eliminated.

Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, this congregation in Durham, North Carolina, has stepped up its efforts to resettle refugees and humanitarian parolees. So far, the congregation has sponsored nine families, or 44 individuals. It now wants to sponsor two more families before it might be too late.

“Based on his promises, Trump will immediately suspend the U.S. refugee admissions program,” explained Marian Abernathy, a lay leader at the 600-member synagogue who has led the refugee resettlement efforts. “Anyone who is not already here and through customs will be turned back. Time is of the essence.”

Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants was a key component of Trump’s 2024 campaign. But experts believe the easiest, most immediate changes in his new term are going to be to legal immigration, with tightening restrictions, if not a complete shutdown, on the number of refugees vetted and approved to enter the United States.

Judea Reform and many other congregations — some Jewish, many Christian — are ramping up their efforts to assist as many refugees as possible in the month and a half left. While some congregations are partnering with the country’s 10 professional resettlement agencies, Judea Reform has been welcoming families via Welcome Corps, a new private sponsorship program that allows groups of five people or more to provide wrap-around support for newly arrived refugees for the first three months or more.

“We’re all trying to think in the same way: what can we do to assist during this emergency moment where we might have to act more quickly,” said Randy Carter, pastor of Temple Baptist Church, also in Durham. Carter’s church turned a vacant church-owned home on its property into temporary housing for refugees. Nearly 175 people have stayed at Temple Baptist’s Welcome Home since it was converted to that purpose last year.

Temple Baptist partners with World Relief, one of 10 faith-based refugee resettlement groups that take on the bulk of the work — securing and furnishing housing, helping refugees find jobs and medical care, enrolling children in school and otherwise integrating them into the community.

The church — part of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship — assists World Relief by providing refugee families housing for up to a month while World Relief finds them rental space. Church teams are now working on trying to turn the home over within a day — cleaning and stocking the refrigerator — for new families. (The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina has a network of 20 such Welcome Homes.)

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World Relief’s Durham office is pushing to resettle as many as 150 refugees before Jan. 20, a faster rate than usual. Last fiscal year it resettled 350 in the larger Triangle region of Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill.

Adam Clark, its executive director, anticipates a slowdown of refugees after Trump assumes office. But he wants to avoid the dismantling of local offices as happened during the previous Trump administration, when 134 resettlement agency offices around the United States shut down.

He is pushing now to get churches more involved and committed to the effort of welcoming refugees.

“We don’t want to just have a view of the next four years as we’re battening down the hatches,” said Clark. “This is an opportunity for churches to become aware of the harsh realities facing immigrant lives and in their communities. And we wanna ask for more volunteers than ever before.”

But some congregations, weary of partnering with resettlement agencies, have already moved on. The Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Durham helped resettle three Afghan families and worked with several refugee agencies donating furniture and other items. Now it has shifted its focus to working more closely with immigrants already here. This month, volunteers from the congregation plan to start teaching a group of eight to 10 Afghan women how to drive, partnering with a local nonprofit committed to helping immigrants overcome cultural barriers.

In a Sept. 15 post on X, Trump said he would “suspend refugee resettlement,” (as well as “end all illegal entries”), a claim he repeated at multiple campaign stops. Refugee advocates take him seriously.

The U.S. president has unilateral authority to set the ceiling on refugee admissions each year. During Trump’s first term, resettlement of refugees plummeted. By the time Trump left office, the annual admissions ceiling had dropped to 15,000 annually, its lowest levels since Congress established the program in 1980.

Danilo Zak. (Photo courtesy Church World Service)

President Biden slowly rebuilt the program, and, during the federal fiscal year that ended in October, more than 100,000 refugees were admitted, the highest number in three decades.

But many more are waiting.

Potential refugees apply to be admitted to the U.S. while they are overseas. First they register with the United Nations refugee agency. The U.S. then selects a certain number from that pool to undergo a rigorous, often yearslong screening process that includes security and medical vetting and interviews with American officers.

Danilo Zak, director of policy at Church World Service, one of the 10 refugee resettlement agencies, said he hoped some of those already vetted and ready to travel to the U.S. would be able to do so.

“If they’re not resettled soon, they’ll need to be re-screened,” said Zak. “And that’s one reason a suspension of the program can prove to be so dramatic in its impact, because it can have these cascading effects where individuals who were ready to be resettled need to go back and complete additional screenings and medical checks that have expired.”

Peg Carlson, a member of Judea Reform Congregation, understands the urgency. She recently retired as a professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill’s School of Government and was impressed with her synagogue’s commitment to refugees. In September, the congregation was honored by HIAS, the refugee resettlement agency, with a Pathways Trailblazer award for its refugee work. (HIAS provides training and support to groups undertaking private sponsorship of refugees through the Welcome Corps program.)

Last week, Carlson signed on to be part of the synagogue’s 11th refugee welcoming team.

“I really felt like this was the clearest kind of action I could take right now that seemed like it might really make a difference for someone and was consistent with the idea of welcoming the stranger as Judaism teaches,” Carlson said. “The fact that there are people waiting for years, for decades, and now the possibility that the door might slam shut, just kills me.”

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