Trump Crushes Refugee Services

But Iowans continue to serve, including some of my friends from Pella...

Mar 07, 2025

Members of the Refugee Engagement and Support Alliance of Pella and some of the refugees they have helped. Photo courtesy Noreen Vander Wal.

Forgive me, but I’m trying to tie several threads together in this column. I’m sure some will be left dangling, but that’s where you can help with this story in the comments section. Thanks. Let’s work this out together. Things are moving quickly.

I learned yesterday morning from Axios Des Moines that “Lutheran Services in Iowa (LSI) will lay off about 30 staff members and cease immigrant and refugee resettlement services next month due to the Trump administration's freeze on foreign aid.”

Federal funding that reimbursed LSI resettlement costs was stopped by a payment freeze in an executive order on January 20. Axios also reports “that the federal government has not reimbursed LSI for about $1.5 million in services it provided in 2024 and early January,” and that “LSI's resettlement services budget is about $5.8 million a year and will end on April 25 if the federal government doesn't resume its contract with the organization.”

I have no words to describe how terrible, cruel, unnecessary, and counter-productive this is, and that our entire Republican congressional delegation is complicit.

On February 13, I posted an interview with Iowa State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott (D) about legislation she proposed that would have the state of Iowa support humanitarian aid for refugees for the first 90 days they are here because Trump broke our promise. She simply asked the state of Iowa to step up and honor our commitment for 90 days of support.

About three weeks later, on Wednesday evening this week, I texted her about the current status of the bill. She replied:

my bill is sitting in a drawer.

it’s assigned to appropriations, so it is funnel proof. There’s still an opportunity, but it would be more likely to get the Governor to authorize emergency funds. Many of the refugee resettlement programs have not been paid for work they did in December—before the Trump administration. Their federal contracts beyond resettlement have not been paid either, and these are reportedly being canceled.

call governor reynolds 515-281-5211 to support refugees with emergency funding i’m encouraging folks to give to USCRI and LSI

USCRI is the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. You can learn more and donate here. LSI is Lutheran Services in Iowa. Learn more and donate here.

And please call the Governor at 515-281-5211. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It was a promise we made, now broken.

It makes both humanitarian and economic sense. Iowa needs the skills these refugees offer in our workforce.

A couple of times over the past few months, I spoke/emailed with my friend Joan Corbin of Pella about a refugee support group that had formed locally—the Refugee Engagement and Support Alliance of Pella. I was excited to learn that a local group was doing this important work.

And when Trump froze payments to contracts that Congress had already awarded, I wondered if it was impacting what Joan and her group were doing, and set up an interview.

We did the interview on February 14, but I goofed up by not posting it until now. I thought the story a little more evergreen than it was, and here we are.

It’s an important and courageous story, and as a prelude to sharing it today, earlier this week I emailed Joan to ask if anything had changed for their group, and our original interview is below our email exchange. Here is what Joan had to say, with the redaction of a name signified by X’s. I didn’t want the name used without getting permission, and obtaining that permission would have taken some time. Here’s Joan:

“Nothing has changed with our group - we continue plans to resettle a new family here. I will say I have been contacted by organizations in Des Moines, like resettlement through Lutheran Services in Iowa, who have received lay-off notices and are concerned about homelessness for those families promised support for 90 days while they access employment. That funding was appropriated through Congress, but was stripped through an executive order and left agencies without the means to support those families. Senator Trone-Garriott introduced a bill in the Iowa Legislature to provide 2.5 million from the state's general fund in early February (SF 223 and HF 662) but I only see it assigned to a subcommittee on Feb 11th, so it hasn't been taken up. I am calling and writing my Congressional reps frequently.

I wholly agree with you as to the sad state of what has been done to LSI! I just spoke to XXXXX who is in a leadership role at LSI resettlement services this week and learned he and his whole team have been laid off…He and his team are devastated and he told me he expects homelessness in Des Moines as jobs become less available AND because many families were in that 90-day window of financial support as they seek jobs and settle. That financial support from Congress has already been appropriated but DOGE put an end to it, so their families are for sure going to struggle.

This doesn’t impact us financially as we are privately funded. However, we were part of Welcome Corp which received federal dollars to create systems and structure for private sponsorship groups and they shut down when the federal government abruptly halted their funding. So we are missing the helpful guidance from Welcome Corp.

I write and call my reps in Congress at least once a week but I need to step up the calls. LSI is a wonderful organization and I am so sad for them and the people they serve.

Below is first the audio of my interview with members of the Refugee Engagement and Support Alliance of Pella, followed by a lightly edited transcript where my questions/comments are in italics. The members of the group I spoke with were Joan Corbin, Chris Allen, Laura Reif, and Noreen Vander Wal.

In these trying times, and despite the harm the Trump administration is doing to so many, I found kindness, courage and hope in our conversation. And love for others.

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Me: Laura, could you tell me what the Refugee Engagement and Support Alliance of Pella (RESAP) is?

Laura: So, we began as Pella Welcome Corp, and we were a part of a national refugee resettlement effort called Welcome Corp and that was about 18 months ago, maybe started in 2023.

So, Welcome Corp was something that was created under the Biden Administration and it allows private individuals to come together and form sponsor groups. And then the sponsor groups in turn work with established refugee resettlement agencies to privately welcome refugee or families of refugees into communities.

So we began as a part of Welcome Corps and our structure and guidance came from Welcome Corps and it came from one of the refugee resettlement agencies which was IRIS (Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, which is now closing one of its two offices because of Trump’s funding cuts). And so through that effort, we were able to welcome a family here to Pella and help them to resettle here with the help of the private sponsor group.

So probably about a third of the way through 2024, we began talking. Those of us that are on the advisory board for Pella Welcome Corps began to talk about longevity and what would happen if a change in administration meant that Welcome Corp ceased to exist (the program has since been suspended by the Trump administration).

Our concern was that depending on the outcome of the election in 2024, that a Trump administration would decide that they no longer wanted the Welcome Corp program to be continued. So, that was our concern. So, we began to make a longevity plan and talk about how can we continue to be helpful, how can we continue to contribute, and how can we continue to exist if Welcome Core is no longer there. And so, what we decided was we would begin to think about ways to pivot our purpose if that were to happen.

And since that is what happened, we worked on creating a new name for ourselves and we are in the process of determining how we pivot so that we are helping refugees who are already in the United States whose well-being has been so adversely impacted by the withdrawal of funds for resettlement.

Refugees, up until recently were guaranteed 90 days of funding to help them get started in the resettlement process. So that would be helping them to find a place to live, to get a job, to do the things they needed to do to start with that settlement. So that funding is what was lost.

And so we've got a lot of refugees here in Iowa already who have been kind of scrambling to figure out how they're going to come up with money that will fill that void. And so we have been talking with refugee resettlement groups in Iowa to say, well, if we're going to pivot and you have folks who are already here and we're already in the process of resettling, how can we work together so that we can assist people who are already here?

And we have a community that has shown that they are willing and interested in helping with this process. So how can we work together to continue to help refugees?

ME: And to be clear, refugee is a legal way to get in. It's not… some people get it confused and think that refugees might be illegal, but no, these are legal people here at our invitation, right?

Laura: That's correct. Yeah, and they're different from asylum. So people also get refugees and asylum seekers confused because asylum seekers previously have been able to apply for asylum once they're already in the United States and there have been concerns about that. Some asylum seekers apply for asylum outside of the United States. Refugees are granted refugee status before they ever get here. So they've gone through a process.

The United Nations has designated them as meeting the definition of a refugee and then the United States government has also designated them as meeting the definition of a refugee and they've had extreme vetting. They've had a lot of background checks. So all of those things have already happened before those people ever get into the country.

Chris: Yeah, this is the most vetted population coming into the US. The screening process is anywhere between 18 to 24 months and upon acceptance, they're put on a waiting list which might take years for their resettlement here. Before January 20, we had a very robust and comprehensive screening process.

It included Homeland Security interviews, biographic checks done by the State Department, national counter-terrorism checks, biometric checks by the FBI and the DOD, and an assessment of any relevant data from Interpol, and finally there's a screening upon entry into the US done by the DHS and US customs.

ME: So, it's important to get that clear. And the funding just went away. Trump stopped it and it was it only amounted to like $18 a day, right? And that's not much, and so groups like yours and others like Lutheran Services in Iowa, are a big one, and some other groups. They have to step forward to help get these refugees on their feet, right?

Noreen: Yeah, when Trump froze the foreign aid package, part of that foreign aid package went to refugee resettlement for people who are here in their first 90 days. So they arrive here and in that first 90 days they get some help with housing, transportation, and employment services. They are assigned a case worker in these resettlement agencies. And so yeah, the loss of that funding meant no case workers, no housing help, no food help. So even though they were pledged that when they were accepted into the United States, all that funding was gone.

Me: And these are refugees from all over the world, correct?

Noreen: Correct.

Me: Yeah. All right. And so Joan, you helped one family, right? So far.

Joan: Yes, we're also committed to a family just recently, but one that resettled through the traditional path of reaching refugee status, and then they were part of that private sponsorship group and did the day-to-day kinds of things.

Chris: And now we're working with our third family.

Me: With a third family. Okay. So is somebody in limbo now? Did I hear that right, somebody that you're supposed to be able to help it's not happening, or explain the current situation with whoever you're trying to help.

Laura: So in addition to what Noreen talked about with stopping the aid, in addition to that, refugee acceptance in the US was halted completely. So two things were happening at the same time. The first one impacted the refugees who were already here, who had come here on the promise of 90 days of support. And then the second thing that was happening, which was separate, was that there was a ban on refugees even coming into the US at all. And that is what Noreen's family that they were ready to sponsor, so that's how that family was impacted.

Noreen: So there was an executive order on January 20 that halted all refugee travel and halted any further processing and accepting of refugee applications. So last fall, we had found a group of seven people to sponsor another family and we were accepted into the US Welcome Corps program and we were matched with an Afghan family of six and we were starting to make preparations for them to come, and then on January 20th, the executive order halted all travel. So before they could get a travel date, that whole process was halted. The executive order says for 90 days, they're going to reevaluate it and reassess it. It's called realigning.

So when that happened, and then followed by the foreign aid freeze, I reached out to Lutheran Services of Iowa, Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services, and the Catherine McCully Center in Cedar Rapids and just said, hey, we know that you're in a tough spot right now. We have a sponsorship group ready to accept a family and we have the finances raised to support that family for 90 days. So if you have anyone who could benefit from our resources we'd like to partner with you. And from that came a Venezuelan family of three who has had some kind of unique situation. They're past the 90-day. There wouldn't be funds for them even if they weren't, but we're now working with the Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services, Iowa Health and Human Services to bring that family to Pella and get them started with housing, employment, English language learning, and all those things.

Me: And so yeah have all of this set up with people in Pella to make this happen.

Noreen: Right. We have a sponsorship group of six now.

Chris: It's been incredible to see how much support there is in our community for refugee resettlement. Both from local businesses and organizations, but also the citizens.

Noreen: And we're partnering with I think I've got five churches on our list. So yeah, we're looking right now. We've got a couple of leads on an apartment. And about five churches that we're going to send lists of like, we need kitchen ware, we need cleaning supplies, we need to stock the pantry, we need furniture. And so we're sharing with these five churches that we have contacted people in these churches and they're eager to help.

Me: Okay, it's nice that if you're one person, there's not a lot we can do because we don't have all the contacts, we can donate money to different organizations, but as a group, you all have different connections, expertise, relationships, so you're able to help in all kinds of ways that probably government institutions directly can't do because they don't necessarily have the relationships in the community. So it's a kind of public-private partnership.

All: Yeah.

Laura: I would just add also that the organization that had existed, Welcome Corp was designed to help private, I mean the whole goal was private monies, people, just normal people in a community who get together and then decide they want to do this and so they provided, even though they don't exist or they're not practicing anymore or whatever, they provided a template for us to follow that was done with the first family and we're continuing to use it and there's steps that we go through and it's very systematic and we have different roles and different, just sort of a lens. I mean we've absorbed the lens of how we are with refugees and how we go about resettling them.

Me: So are there any concerns on the horizon that you see?

Noreen: Well, unless the refugee admissions program gets restarted, you know, there won't be any future refugees to welcome, and well, that's a huge concern because there are so many people in the world who are desperate to find a place to live where they're safe and where they're free. And that's really what got me engaged into the Welcome Corp system because I'd see on the news and it was very troubling to me that there are so many places in the world where people are literally fleeing for their lives and they don't have a place, they don't have a home.

And three of my four grandparents were immigrants. And so I grew up knowing that I was here in the United States because three of my four grandparents made that transition and I just want to offer that to somebody else, to offer them the opportunity to live in a place where they don't have to be afraid, where they can find food, and safety, and friendship.

So that's a concern for me. Where are these people going to find that if the United States doesn't reignite this program?

Me: Anybody else?

Laura: I think that there's a misconception that when it comes to refugees our country and our communities cannot absorb refugees into the communities. And I think that what we have done in the past 18 months, to two years has shown that that is not the case. There are there are jobs available for people. There are employers who want to employ refugees.

There are employers who are willing to go that extra mile to make sure that refugees are learning English so they can they can become more— I don't know what's the word I want to use, but one of the things that we learned early on from someone who works with refugees is, think about the timeline of what it takes somebody to adapt to a new life. It takes, a year for someone to adjust to a move. When you add into that, someone who's left their home country with the stress that most folks don't, they didn't want to leave their own, they wouldn't have chosen to leave their home country if they didn't have to. They felt they they had no choice and the refugee process confirms that they had no other choice by the way that it is structured.

But you add on top of that, having to learn English, having to learn new cultural norms, being away from family, and having families separated by this. Not everybody may have been granted refugee status. So when you look at the time that it takes for living in the US to feel normal to somebody, or to feel manageable to somebody, language is is a really, really big part of that.

And there are, I think we've shown just in this community that there are people that are willing to step up and say, we want to help with that. So employers, ELL tutors, retired teachers, people who never taught before that are saying, "I can help someone learn English." This idea that we can't accommodate that, and sort of absorb that need, I don't think that that's true. I think it is a misconception that people have.

Me: Well, we all have friends who just don't care. They don't care. That's their problem. It's not my problem. How do we talk to those those people?

Chris: Yeah, every day it becomes more obvious that we're living in a time when empathy, compassion, and our mercy muscles need to be put to use, otherwise, they're going to atrophy. Refugee resettlement has always been an opportunity for us to be a beacon of hope and good in this world. And as odd as it may sound, that doesn't align with the values of some, but it does align with the roots of this community. In 1847, a wave of Dutch immigrants settled in this area and named their new home Pella, which means “city of refuge.” It was a refuge for those trying to find a new home. That's this town's DNA. That is a great way to sum up the values of our community.

Noreen: And I don't know that I would say that there, that I talk to people who just don't care. I think they do care, and they do realize that there are people who are living in terrible situations. But they say, "But our system is so broken. We have to fix things."

And my response to that is I can clean my house without tearing the whole thing down while people are inside. I saw a political cartoon and it was six men on a boat and they were tearing the large boat that they were on apart to make individual boats. In other words, the whole ship was going to sink, but they would have their own individual boat. You know, you can you can fix things and yes, I know that there are people here illegally. And I know that our immigration system is broken and I know that... I just read a statistic, something like 70 some percent of evangelical Christians want to fix the broken immigration system. And I think we can do that without halting all refugees arriving here--it's legal. But there are people who think that's broken too.

So, I think they have compassion and I think they want to fix it. I think we all want to fix it. But I think we just have different ideas of how this needs to be fixed and I don't agree with how they're fixing it. I think we're overreacting in a big way that is hurting people. It's hurting people.

Me: It's been made of political football.

Them: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Noreen: And I guess I got a correspondence from a legislator that basically said, "Well, I understand where you're coming from, but this needs to be fixed. And so people are going to suffer for a while.” I just I don't agree with that method.

Chris: And statements like that are quite convenient because they're not the ones suffering.

Me: What I don't get is why everybody acts like it's pie and that if if somebody else gets a piece, that means I don't get a piece rather than seeing how this really you just make the pie bigger.

Chris: I like to liken it to it's more like a bush. You cut off a branch and two grow instead. You know, the idea of generosity, it's the kind of thing that if anything can multiply. And we're investing in refugees. They have a lot to bring to the table. They have a lot to contribute to our country.

Noreen: And I read something recently too that talked about, you know, whenever you offer compassion, there are people who are going to abuse it and there are people who are going to take advantage of it. Actually, a recent refugee commented to me. She referred to the parable in the Bible of the wheat and the weeds and how they sowed the wheat, but during the night the enemy came and planted weeds and so the wheat grew up with the weeds and they said to the landowner, "You know, should we go out and pull out the weeds?" And he said, "No, because if you pull out the weeds, you're pulling out the wheat too. Let them grow together and we'll harvest what's good." And I guess I know the immigration system is broken. I know a lot of social services have flaws, but there is also a tremendous amount of good coming out of those and by trying to eradicate so viciously the bad, we're pulling out the good with it.

Laura: Something else that I think goes back to the executive order that blocked all refugees from entering the US is that was when that took effect, there were airplanes in Afghanistan with people who were ready, who had refugee status who have been waiting years to come here.

And those folks were on airplanes or ready to get on airplanes and they were told that their flights were canceled and they wouldn't be coming. So we can all in our brains think, oh, I understand maybe why those Afghans were refugees. I understand maybe what their lives might have been like. So, but maybe our ability to feel compassion for them stops there because we think we know.

So, what Joan and I learned a couple, was it last week, we went to Des Moines to take some items to a family that was here that were from Afghanistan. And we—it was Joan's idea. She got matched up with this family that needed some items and we went to visit them, and this is the story that they told us, the dad, and I don't give too much personal information, but the dad helped the United States Army during the Afghan war. He was an interpreter and he worked on an Army base. He saved American soldiers' lives. And he did it knowing the peril that he would be in, in his home country for himself and his family.

He knew that and he chose to help America. He chose to put his entire family's safety and lives literally on the line to do that. So, when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, he was allowed to leave, but his family had to stay behind. He has a wife and he had, I don't remember how many children because not all of his children survived while he was gone. So, he was separated from his family for four years. And during that time he initially went to, I think he said Fort Bragg, and then he was in Germany, at a US Army base in Germany and then he came to the US to live. And all this time he's waiting to get his family here.

He had very little to live on because it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make that happen because of the structures in Afghanistan and the way that is set up. To get them here. So he got them here two days before the executive order said no more airplanes. Two days before that.

And so we're meeting with them in their apartment and they welcome us in and they make us tea and we take our shoes off when we sit on the floor and we're eating these foods they've they've managed to find at Walmart that resemble the foods they would have served guests in Afghanistan. And we're sitting with these incredibly, just beautiful children from age two to nine.

And these are his surviving children. There were others, they didn't all make it. And he told us, my son had to stop going to school because the Taliban figured out that I was his father and they came looking for him. He's seven. He's seven. My daughter, who is nine, is incredibly bright, cannot go to school anymore. She was able to go to school and then she was told she will never go to school again.

My sisters, who are professionals in the medical field, can't even leave their homes without a man anymore. They will never practice their professions again. My family wasn't allowed to go to the park. There were all of these things and he said they've been in hiding because I helped the United States. If my family had stayed there, they would have come after my children. They say he saved American soldiers’ lives. That's who we've turned our backs on.

That's what a refugee looks like and that is what we turned our backs on. And just like this. So when someone says, "Oh, well, we don't have enough or I don't feel compassion or I don't…" I tell you what, sit down with somebody and listen to their story, listen to what they've been through. It's, there's this idea that we are scarce in resources or that we can't share. I don't know where that comes from.

But I think a lot of what people are thinking and feeling when they're reacting negatively to refugees is based in fear. Like, I fear what I don't know, I fear what I don't understand. And so I'm responding out of that fear. If we would take the time to learn, to sit down, to talk to people, to understand stories that are different from ours. It helps the fear to dissipate and it helps us to see each other's as human beings.

And I tell people they…people that come here, they want the same things for their children that we do. They want enough food, they want them to have medical care when they need it, they want them to get an education. They want to be able to work. There's dignity in work, there's such dignity in work. They want that too. They want the same things that we do.

Noreen: And safety. And safety. People don't know. People don't know what it's like to live in fear in the United States, really. I mean, I know there are things we are afraid of that we don't we don't understand living in fear the way a refugee does. No.

Me: Well, Joan, I'm going to let you wrap up. How can we help?

Joan: Well, since there's not money and funding going to federal sources or any government sources, the private sponsorship groups are not going to resettle a new family here because of the ban on that, but there are families here who need more support who may be beyond the 90 days of support in some other community but still have needs. And so like donations to private sponsorship groups, not just ours, but other groups, that’s one way. What else can you think of Noreen?

Noreen: Well, World Relief, Lutheran Services, Catholic charities, all of these organizations that were using federal funds to help refugees now are relying on private donors and the generosity of private citizens. And all of those are very easy to find online.

Me: And how about if somebody wants to reach out, to this group?

Laura: Maybe start with the Facebook page.

Noreen: Yeah, you can also go to Crossroads of Pella.

Chris: Our mailing address if you want us to help donate towards this program is 712 Union Street, Pella, Iowa 50219. But then you can also on our web page find more information on how to get connected into this program and be a part of something special.

Noreen: And there's also a donate button on your web page.

Chris: There is.

Noreen: Yeah, for I think it's still under Pella Welcome Corp. We're kind of in transition between our previous Pella Welcome Corp name and our new RESAP name. But yeah, we're the same organization.

Laura: And if there are people out there who are thinking about the sponsorship idea and thinking, that's something I'd like actually like to do. I'd actually like to be a part of a team that helps to welcome a family. That's an area where we are continuing to explore what our partnerships with groups in Des Moines and Iowa City might look like so that we would, as Joan was saying, we would use the structure that Welcome Corp gave us and that worked really well and we are copying that structure to form sponsor groups so that there might be families in Iowa that would really just thrive in Pella for a lot of reasons and we've seen that with the most recent family that's coming here.

So that we can say, okay, well, we can still form sponsor groups. We can still sponsor a family to come here. They just would be coming from maybe another area in Iowa. And with that first sponsor group, I would say there were five of us who were officially on there, but the group was a little bigger than that, but many of us never, we didn't know each other before we were on that group together. We might have known each or crossed paths a little bit, but we didn't know each other and we just came together because we all cared, and it worked really beautifully because every one of us had different skills and abilities, and because of that, we were able to work together in a way that filled all the gaps for that family. So, if there's anyone out there that's thinking maybe I'll feel better about things if I can help someone or maybe I can't really afford to give much money, but I have time.

Joan: Or I might have some resources of um you know, beds, household goods, things that we need to furnish a home for families.

Laura: It's all the way from I want to help sponsor somebody to I can buy a set of silverware and donate it.

Noreen: We're also just kind of taking the first steps in this in an ELL tutoring program. There's a lot of retired educators in Pella and I'm finding that there's more and more people in Pella who would like to improve their English. So, I've started just advertising very slowly because we're just getting started but I have about 15 students signed up that would like a tutor in English and I have five tutors signed up and on Monday we're just going to start pairing some of those people up. So if anyone's interested in tutoring somebody one-on-one for just one hour a week helping them learn English and maybe making a new friend because what I'm finding is these people who come together, they become friends. So it's a great thing.

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