Key U.S. Representatives and Senators recently urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately revoke the stop work orders that the Department issued on January 24, 2025, to 10 national resettlement agencies.

“This unprecedented order threatens to deprive refugees already in the United States of the vital assistance known as Reception and Placement (R&P) services, which help them during their first three months in the United States as they rebuild their lives here,” the letter said.

The stop work orders “undermine legal obligations that the Department has entered into through its contracts with U.S.-based and intergovernmental organizations, increasing new arrivals’ vulnerability to homelessness and food insecurity at a time when they still have no lifeline for support,” the letter said.

The R&P program covers basic needs like rent, food, clothes, and furnishing
in the first few months after arrival, “providing core services for refugees who often resettle with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.” Barring R&P services, including Virtual R&P available to self-traveling Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), “will cause undue and unnecessary suffering and hardship, breaking a promise we made to the refugees and SIVs when we approved them for resettlement in America.”

Among his first wave of executive orders signed on Jan. 20, President Trump suspended the U.S. refugee program.

“As one of the 10 refugee resettlement agencies in the U.S., HIAS is dismayed at the Trump administration’s decision to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program,” the immigration and refugee group said. “While the suspension indicates the opportunity for case-by-case exceptions, it will place refugees waiting overseas for admission in immediate potential danger.”

“America is at its best when we welcome refugees,” said HIAS President Mark Hetfield.  “We are appalled by the callousness that this administration is taking toward victims of violence and persecution. Refugee resettlement is a safe and legal pathway, it is a longstanding, bipartisan tradition, it strengthens our national security, and it brings enormous economic and cultural benefits to our communities.” HIAS is ready to work with the Trump administration to restart the program as quickly as possible and to continue to provide an orderly and secure pathway for refugees who have fled religious and other forms of persecution. “

Global Refuge, one of the nation’s oldest and largest refugee resettlement nonprofits, expressed profound concern over today’s suspension of the USRAP.

“The refugee program is not just a humanitarian lifeline through which the U.S. has shown global leadership. It represents the gold standard of legal immigration pathways in terms of security screening, community coordination, and mutual economic benefit,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Global Refuge.

She noted that refugees “undergo rigorous vetting, including multiple background checks by national security agencies, before ever setting foot on American soil. Their integration is coordinated through close collaboration between federal agencies, local stakeholders, and nonprofit organizations, including many faith-based groups, positioning them to quickly become vital contributors to their new communities. The US Refugee Admissions Program was designed and ameliorated over four decades precisely to address the concerns used to suspend it today.”

“As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost of silence,” writes Michael Luo in the New Yorker, drawing parallels with Chinese exclusion efforts in the U.S. in the late 1800s.

“The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States,” he writes in his piece, “History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism.”

Luo notes that much of the anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1800s in the U.S. was driven by economic anxiety experienced by white workers in the West.

But he cites studies showing that the removal of Chinese workers did little in the way of helping those workers.

“One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in direct competition with white workers.”

This past fall, a group of economists released a working paper on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Western states, noted Luo.

“They found that it took a significant toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese populations––until at least 1940.”

The economists also found “no evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese immigrants in the workforce, “including the economies of scale achieved by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that emerged from their absence,” the article noted.

Pope Francis has named Cardinal Robert McElroy, bishop of San Diego, “to be the next Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, moving one of his most vocal allies on immigration to one of the most prominent posts in the American church,” the New York Times reported on January 6.

Speaking at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, McElroy said, “The Catholic church teaches that a nation has the right to control its borders and our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort.”

At the same time, “we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans that have been talked about at some levels of having a wider, indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”