Little Amal rests her head on the LOVE sign at LOVE Park on Sept. 14, 2023. Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl, has become a global symbol of the plight of refugees and their human rights since she was first created two years ago. Heather Khalifa / Staff Photographer
A nonprofit group that helps refugees resettle across Pennsylvania furloughed two-thirds of its workforce Monday following President
Donald Trump’s executive order halting refugee resettlement and federal funding to assist refugees already here.
Church World Services, which provides refugee resettlement services out of a Lancaster and a Harrisburg office, notified two-thirds of its employees that they would be furloughed for the next 60 days.
About 1,000 employees will be furloughed nationwide, 150 from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
“Cutting back this many people who provide help to people who have fled conflicts and wars — our job is to help the most vulnerable immigrants and now we’re having to really reduce our ability to do that in the middle of winter,” said Courtney Madsen, regional director for CWS in the Northeast. “It’s really terrifying.”
Madsen said Trump’s order suspending resettlement and a stop work order coupled with confusion over a
federal funding freeze rescinded less than two days later, forced the organization’s hand.
The organization fronts costs and relies on reimbursements but has not received any money from the Office of Refugee Resettlement since December.
For decades the federal refugee program provided a legal form of migration to the U.S. for those who have escaped war, natural disaster, or persecution. Despite long-standing support for accepting refugees,
the program has become politicized in recent years, and on Jan. 24 Trump
halted new refugee admissions and issued a “stop work” order.
The directive ordered an immediate suspension, pending a 90-day review, of foreign assistance programs. The U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration has said officials would then determine which programs see funding restoring and at what level. Some programs could lose all of their funding permanently.
“The most unsettling thing is this is very indefinite,” said Madsen, who has worked in refugee resettlement since 2007. “This came very suddenly and with no clarity on what will happen after a review or what to expect next.”
The furloughs will impact programs beyond actual resettlement. The organization also offers health education, legal services, workforce training, and English language training to refugees legally in the country.
Similar
organizations were reporting cutbacks this week, including one in
Connecticut that laid off 20% of its staff and another in Clearwater bracing for layoffs.
Meanwhile,
some refugees and their families in the area are pleading with members of Congress to intervene in individual cases, seeking help for people fleeing conflict zones who would have been accepted under previous U.S. guidelines for accepting refugees.
In 2017, Trump signed an executive order that indefinitely suspended the resettlement of Syrian refugees and paused the overall refugee resettlement program. It also instituted a temporary ban on refugees from seven majority-Muslim nations. That order was met with widespread outrage.
This time, Trump lined up a series of executive orders on the issue as soon as he took office.
“In the first administration … there was a large public outcry that followed,” Madsen said. “In part because there were people stuck in airports — and Afghan allies were stuck in airports. The other difference this time is the profound silence we’re hearing from the community, at this point. Or if there are people who are concerned, they feel hopeless or they feel afraid.”
