A President-Trump executive order late last month suspended refugee admissions to the
U.S. and resettlement funds.
This year, more than 1,800 refugees from all over the world settled in Wisconsin.
The Christian, humanitarian, nonprofit, refugee resettlement agency, World Relief operates
in the Fox Valley and Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin.
We turn to Matthew Sorens, Vice President of Advocacy and Policy at World Relief for
more on this situation.
And thanks very much for being here.
Yeah, I'm so glad I can be with you.
And we understand that refugees ready to travel to the U.S. had their flights canceled
when this executive order came down.
Was your agency in Wisconsin expecting people on those flights or flights in subsequent
days?
Yeah, I mean, we had travel that was confirmed.
Of course, we were aware that the president might do something similar to what President
Trump did back in 2017.
So I think we were aware of this being a possibility of suspending refugee resettlement.
In cases where it was family reunification, where we've got somebody in Wisconsin who
was waiting to be reunited to a loved one, you know, I think we would have at least shared
that we're concerned that this could be a possibility, but that doesn't do anything
to change the devastation when a family that, in some cases, might have been waiting for
a decade apart often with that loved one stuck in a refugee camp overseas and that travel
had to be canceled.
And we are hopeful and prayerful that the president will resume refugee resettlement
after the initial 90-day suspension of resettlement that was announced on his first day in office.
Because where does the suspension of the program leave those people clear to come here and
those hoping to?
Yeah, it leaves them with a lot of uncertainty and I mean, frankly, refugees live in some
of the most vulnerable situations in the world, often in camp settings, often in a second
country where they're being allowed to reside but not to work lawfully, so not able to provide
for themselves.
So that opportunity for resettlement to rebuild their lives in a state like Wisconsin, while
also contributing to the economy and meeting key labor needs, is an incredible opportunity
and what we're just really devastated, and this includes people who are allies of the
U.S. military from Afghanistan who are at risk because of their service to the United
States mission in Afghanistan, it includes persecuted Christians and other religious
minorities who were persecuted for their faith in their country of origin and were desperate
for the religious liberty that we offer here in the United States.
So it is really devastating and again, we're really hoping and praying, you know, President
Trump has said that he values legal immigration.
He has talked as recently as in the last few days about wanting to defend persecuted Christians.
The refugee resettlement program is an important way to be able to do both of those things.
Have you had any outreach from the Trump administration or have you reached out to them
on this?
We have, you know, we actually, even before inauguration, we had helped mobilize a Christian
state-bound refugee resettlement and we aren't an evangelical Christian organization, so we've
had more than 11,000 Christians around the country sign on to a statement.
Again, many of these are people who voted for President Trump.
This isn't about Republicans or Democrats, but on this question of refugee resettlement,
this unequivocally legal form of immigration that helps people who fled persecution, there's
really broad bipartisan support.
But I would say, you know, we've communicated that to the White House.
Actually the communication that we've received, post inauguration has been discouraging because
we were actually told on January 24th, a few days after inauguration, that not only was
refugee resettlement being suspended going forward for at least 90 days, which we had
opposed but maybe anticipated might be a possibility, but then we got word on the 24th of January
that we should stop all work to provide support for refugees who had already been resettled
in the previous 90 days in places like Appleton and Eau Claire and Oshkosh.
And that has put us in a really challenging situation because, you know, we've committed
to provide housing for those refugees in Wisconsin, it's about 175 people.
And that's, of course, a lot of resources that we had expected the federal government
to follow through on their commitment for.
And now we're working with churches and other individual donors to meet that very significant
gap.
I understand that is about 175 refugees, newly here, that you were hoping to provide these
services for and how much in loss funding does that represent for you?
You know, I don't know the specific figure for Wisconsin at the national level.
We estimate it somewhere around $8 million that we're needing to raise very quickly.
That's not actually all the costs, but to cover the most basic expenses for the roughly
4,000 people that we've resettled around the country, and again, 175 of those are there
in Wisconsin.
And that, again, the biggest cost there is rent.
You can do the math on covering rent for 175 people for three months, which is about
the federal government committed to these people before they arrived, and what we committed
to them as well.
And we're doing our very best to keep that commitment.
We don't want to see anyone without housing, and we want them to be able to be economically
self-sufficient on month four and have a job and be able to cover their own expenses.
That's how this system usually works.
But when the government kind of pulls out of the public part of that public-private partnership,
we're relying very heavily on churches and individual donors to help fill in those gaps.
All right.
We need to live it there, Matthew Soren.
Thanks very much, and thanks for your work.
Thank you.
For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at pbswisconsin.org and
then click on the News tab.
That's our program for tonight.
I'm Frederica Freiberg.
Have a good weekend.
I'm sorry for the plate that you and your organization find yourselves in.
But thank you.
I think it really showed