The U.S. government just abandoned its commitment to thousands of refugees who were already vetted, approved, and resettled—leaving them without critical support. World Relief’s Matthew Soerens joins Skye Jethani to break down Trump’s latest refugee policy, why it’s more than just politics, and how the church must step up. What happens when a nation breaks its promises to the most vulnerable? And what can Christians do about it? This is a transcript of our interview with Matthew Soerens from Holy Post Podcast episode 654. It has been condensed and edited for clarity. You can watch the interview here
Skye Jethani: Matt, thanks for coming back to the Holy Post, especially in a week that I'm sure has been incredibly busy and stressful for you and everyone else at World Relief. Let's begin by just explaining to everyone, what did President Trump order last week, his first week in office, regarding refugees?
Matthew Soerens: The most significant thing, and one that frankly we were expecting, was the suspension of the U. S. Refugee Resettlement Program and it is to last at least 90 days. Then, the secretary of homeland security, in consultation with the secretary of state, is supposed to recommend to president Trump whether he should resume refugee resettlement.
Skye Jethani: How is that different from what he did in his first term?
Matthew Soerens: I would say that's actually very similar, but the second dynamic that actually hit us last Friday, was a further order on realigning U. S. foreign assistance. We've been paying attention to that and are very concerned about the impact of that order on the work that we have in other countries around the world partnering with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Frankly, it hadn't occurred to us that anyone considered the U. S. Refugee Resettlement Program to be foreign assistance, but under that order, we were given instructions at World Relief as of late Friday afternoon to stop all work of the refugee resettlement program that we've been partnering with the federal government on since the 70s.
This is looking not just forward to refugees who won't be allowed to come in the future. This is telling us that for the roughly 4,000 individuals whom across our network we've resettled in the last 90 days, who the State Department is committed to provide housing and other basic needs, that we would not be reimbursed for those expenses.
Skye Jethani: I want to make sure people understand what's going on here because obviously the federal government is a huge bureaucracy. It makes decisions all the time. Unfortunately, some of those decisions inadvertently affect and harm people caught in the system. It's not intentional. It's not deliberate. It’s what happens when you're dealing with a huge bureaucracy. This, however, is different. Explain what the refugee resettlement program looks like? When someone is in another country, and they're a refugee, how do they end up in the system and what does our government commit to do for them? How has this order disrupted that?
Matthew Soerens: Yes, This is a totally separate conversation from issues at the border. Refugee resettlement is a legal process. It actually has its legal basis in a law signed by President Carter back in 1980, and that law actually gives the president the authority to set the maximum number on how many refugees are allowed into the United States each year. It also defines what a refugee is. It's someone who has fled their country because of a well founded fear of persecution, specifically on account of their race, religion, political opinion, national origin, or social group.
For example, of the 100,000 refugees resettled last year into the United States, about 30,000 of them are Christian refugees from the countries where Christians face the most severe persecution in the world.
When someone flees their homeland, most of the time they register with the United Nations Refugee Agency, and then an officer of the United States government will individually consider cases. It's a very small share of the world's refugees who get considered for refugee resettlement. In the Biden administration, it was 100,000 at most, but there are roughly 37 million refugees in the world so you can do the math on that. We're talking in the neighborhood of one quarter of 1 percent of the world's refugees who got selected last year and they go through a very thorough vetting process that takes months to complete.
There are individual interviews. There's lots of biometric checks, health checks as well. Then if they are confirmed, they schedule flights and that's when World Relief comes in and other resettlement agencies. We're basically told hey, we've got a family of five from Afghanistan arriving at O'Hare on this date at this time. Will you confirm that you will be there to pick them up? We also confirm that we will have housing available for them and at that point we reach out to our church partners to make sure that we have an apartment furnished, and ideally, a team of volunteers to relationally surround that family well beyond that first 90 days.
This is the way it has always functioned, again going back to the 70s. The government pitches in the most basic expenses, housing primarily, for those first 90 days. World Relief contributes some with private contributions from churches and others, but our main contributions are actually after those first 90 days, in terms of volunteers and in kind donations.
The part that's falling apart right now is the government has said, after the fact, for refugees who've already been resettled, again about 4,000 people, they will not be covering those expenses. So we are scrambling to make sure they have housing.
Skye Jethani: This is the part that I find so infuriating. These are not people who arrived at our border who are seeking asylum. These are people that the federal government vetted and recognized they have a legitimate threat against them. They're legitimate refugees. We invited them here willingly and the federal government said for the first three months that you are here, we will cover your expenses to help you have the time to find a job, to find community, find employment, to get your feet under you.
I can get it if Donald Trump came into office and said, you know what? I don't like this program. I don't like how many refugees we're letting in and we're going to severely cut that, even end it. But he didn't just do that. He took the people we already said yes to and are already in the system and are already financially dependent on the federal government for that 90 days of assistance and pulled the rug out from under them and left them hanging with nothing.
What explanation have you heard for that approach? Because on the surface, it just sounds cruel. If people knew they were going to get no assistance, they may not have chosen to come, but they came because the government promised to help them. What explanation have you heard as to why they decided on this policy?
Matthew Soerens: Yeah, I think the biblical principle here is let your yes be your yes, and your no be your no. Our government said yes to a very relatively small number of refugees around the world and World Relief said yes, presuming that we would be able to bring together our private resources with these governmental resources to serve these families well.
We have a really good track record of serving people really well. The refugee resettlement system actually works really well. It is a model of how to help immigrants integrate into a community and become economically self-sufficient and net contributors in a fairly short period of time because they get that relatively small amount of assistance.
We've had very little communication with the U.S. government on this. We've of course sought that and would love for them to tell us we misunderstood what is a fairly clear order to stop work immediately as of last Friday afternoon. I'm concerned that we will actually see challenging situations of people not able to integrate nearly as well if we're not able to support them and my hope is that if that was the goal, to show how this system doesn't work by pulling away the fundings very abruptly, that the church steps up in a really profound way so we can continue to serve people who have already been resettled and keep our commitment to them.
Skye Jethani: There's been a lot of commentary out there on President Trump's ability to grasp complicated and nuanced policies, and I'm not going to go there, but I trust that there are people within his administration and certainly at the State Department who could have drafted an executive order that said something like we're going to put an immediate halt to all new refugee resettlement and yet complete our commitment to those already resettled in the US.
Or another example would be we're going to stop all resettlement of refugees, but those who helped U. S. military personnel in Afghanistan, for example, who are being threatened by the Taliban.We're gonna make an exception for them because they were allies of the U. S. in wartime, and we're not going to abandon them to our enemies.
It's not difficult to draft an executive order that addresses some of these nuanced situations. And the fact that they didn't, isn't an oversight. It's not that they weren't capable of, or they didn't think about it. This had to be a deliberate choice and it's hard to move beyond the idea that it isn't just cruelty. Or to your point, maybe they just want to undermine the whole system so then they have rationale for later changing the whole system.
Then there's a dramatic difference between a refugee and an asylum seeker and in some of the conversations I've seen online, and even some of the news coverage of this, it's clear that there are newscasters, journalists, and certainly general public that don't get those nuances, or the difference between an undocumented immigrant, an asylum seeker, and a refugee and they're very different. They have different legal statuses, and the outcomes of those situations are very different, but by lumping them all together as immigrants are bad and dangerous, you get these kinds of really inhumane policies.
Let's turn now to what are the options in front of you as World Relief and us as Christians who care about our neighbors, including our recently resettled refugee neighbors? What can we do at this moment to help these folks?
Matthew Soerens: I've really been compelled that now is the moment for the church to stand in the gap. Historically, this has been a partnership between the U. S. government and faith based organizations like World Relief and lots of local churches. Right now, it might need to be all faith based organizations and the church and individual volunteers and donors.
GAP also works as a pretty good acronym of what we need people to do.
Giving - Between the effects on our U. S. resettlement program, those 4, 000 refugees, and then a couple more million impacting very vulnerable people internationally, we're facing a hole of about 8 million at World Relief that we weren't planning on a week ago so giving is really important. People can do that at worldrelief.org/stand, on that theme of standing in the gap.
Advocacy - I don't unfortunately have a cell phone number for president Trump or Vice President Vance or secretary of state Rubio, but reaching out to members of Congress even though they don't necessarily have all the direct authority here, they do have some authority and they certainly have an oversight function. I think especially especially within the president's own party, they're hearing you went too far on this one perhaps they'll step back.
We've done polling with lifeway research that 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe the U S has a moral responsibility to receive refugees. 90 plus percent think we should have secure borders as well. Those things are not exclusive to have functional legal processes for people fleeing persecution and to have secure borders
The last piece is Prayer. I have spent a lot of time praying certain psalms in the last few days, because I don't have a great strategy for solving this situation. My biggest prayer, honestly, is that the church would step up in such a way to allow world relief to keep our commitments to those we've already resettled and some of the situations internationally. We're literally talking about nutrition programs for children under the age of five.
So praying for those who are affected, but also praying that the church would step up so dramatically, not only that it would meet those huge gaps, but also that it would send the political message that if your impression was that evangelical Christians and other Christians, many of whom voted for president Trump, of course, would be fine with this, that was actually an incorrect political assessment. Christians have nuanced political views and we do want secure borders and we do want order at the border, but we also want people to be treated humanely. We want to see human life protected, including those facing incredible humanitarian crises around the world.
We also want to see our country keep its commitment to refugees who have already been resettled after fleeing horrific situations overseas, including many of whom are persecuted for their faith in Jesus.
Skye Jethani: I don't know what the views are of everyone engaging with the Holy Post community. No doubt there are some who are very progressive on their views of immigrants. There may be some who are very conservative who are like, build the wall, stop immigration, deport everyone who's undocumented.
I want even those people to contact their senators and representatives about this refugee issue because this is a completely different issue. These are people again, who are fleeing persecution, who have been through months and months of vetting from the federal government, who've been invited to this country by the American government, and who we made a commitment to help and now we've abandoned them. That's a very different situation than open borders and undocumented people coming in.
If you really do care about immigration reform, and maybe you're even somebody who thinks we should be allowing far fewer immigrants into this country, then what you want is a humane, orderly, reliable system and what this policy has done is broken promises that America made. It's now chaotic, and it's putting people in peril that, as you mentioned, many of whom are our sisters and brothers in Christ who are fleeing persecution. That is not what a strong, moral, righteous country does. It's an embarrassment to those of us who really want to be proud of America. Even if you have disagreed with everything else I may have said over the years on this show about immigration, you shouldn't be against me, or Matt, or World Relief, or millions of other Christians around the country on this one.
Matt, we're both in the Chicago area and I know there's a lot of holy posters in this area. Anything tangible that we can do right here to help some of our immigrant communities or refugees that are being resettled in our immediate area.
Matthew Soerens: Yeah, if there was an S to add to that acronym of GAP, it would be service. The last thing I want people to hear is, World Relief doesn't need volunteers anymore because we actually have resettled a lot of people in the last three months and our commitment is to serve them, past those first 90 days.
We need volunteers from local churches, standing alongside them for the long haul and that's true here in the Chicagoland area. We have well over 100 people among those 4000 in Texas alone. We have almost 500 people in our three offices in Texas and we continue to need volunteers. Frankly, then we need the cash to keep our volunteer coordinators employed because it takes a little bit of coordination.
Skye Jethani: There's been rhetoric for a long time about people who say the federal government or the government in general shouldn't be involved in all kinds of things. They shouldn't be doing welfare, they shouldn't be doing insurance, they shouldn't be doing refugee resettlement. That's the church's job.
Okay. Here's your chance. The federal government has just abandoned its commitment financially to this thing and it's an opportunity for very conservative church minded Christians to go, okay, we'll take it from here. We will step up and fill this gap. So I hope you're right. I hope we do see that happen in the church right now and that attempts to use immigrants and refugees as a convenient bludgeon politically because they're not voting. They're not citizens and they seem to be neglected by so many. I hope that the message gets sent that we Christians will care and we will step in and we will do what's right. Even when our government that we've elected won't.
Matthew Soerens: If I could add one thing, while the refugee issue is quite separate from broader questions of immigration and borders and people who may not be here lawfully, there are also some really concerning things affecting immigrant congregations right now.
There's lots of that here in Chicago, at least rumors, that the new administration actually withdrew guidance that said that ICE shouldn't conduct an immigration raid during a church service except for in unique circumstances So they already had the authority if there's a public safety threat, if a terrorist runs into a church there was a means for ICE to have that authority to go into a church to protect the public safety. But we don't want them just showing up and standing outside of a church on a Sunday morning. I go to a Spanish speaking church where I know that there's a lot of fear around whether to go to church or not and frankly our government shouldn't be doing anything to deter people from going to church.
We want people to hear the gospel. We want them to be discipled, to be more like Christ. It's really a concerning infringement upon religious liberty, in my mind, for the government to take this action.
I read one report today in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, of at least one person being apprehended at church last Sunday. and a person from Honduras who had sought asylum at the border, had been checking in with ICE as required, who's now work authorized because he has a pending asylum application, and he was picked up at church. His wife and his children are, of course, devastated, and there's no indication that he had a criminal history. Those dynamics are also very upsetting to us and something the church needs to be ready to speak into.
Skye Jethani: I'm sure you recall that during the pandemic, there were a lot of people who were furious when the government, both state, local and federal government, issued instructions for churches to not gather and people thought this is the government persecuting Christians, preventing worship, and there was a lot of Christian leaders who defied that order and said, we're going to worship anyway.
Where's the outrage over this? The federal government saying we are going to possibly raid your worship service in order to arrest people who are undocumented and it sends a chilling effect. That's gonna scare people away from gathering for worship. The ability to see one is problematic and the other not is just bonkers to me. The idea of raiding churches during worship should be a line we don't cross in this country.
Learn how recent executive orders are having a devastating impact on thousands of refugees and humanitarian programs both in the U.S. and globally, and find out how you can help make a difference! https://worldrelief.org/stand-in-the-gap/?utm_source=HolyPost&utm_medium=ShowNotes&utm_campaign=EO_UrgentAppeal
Partner with World Relief: https://give.worldrelief.org/site/Donation2?df_id=5541&5541.donation=form1&mfc_pref=T&utm_source=HolyPost&utm_medium=ShowNotes&utm_campaign=EO_UrgentAppeal
Sign the Christian Statement on Refugee Resettlement: https://worldrelief.org/christianstatement/
Easy tool to contact Congress with talking points: https://p2a.co/AEQhezU
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