Omar, a Pakistani asylum seeker in Bangkok, remembers the moment he fully understood the precarious nature of his situation. He was 16 and riding his bike home from church when Thai police officers picked him up, stuffed him in a taxi, and brought him to a detention center. For seven hours, Thai officers interrogated, slapped, and humiliated him.
Omar had escaped Pakistan, where his family was persecuted for associating with Christians, at the age of nine. His family went to Thailand, the closest country where they could easily get visas, but overstayed their visas as they sought refugee status at Bangkok’s office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). They hoped for a chance to one day resettle in a different country. As they received help from Christians, the family converted from Islam to Christianity.
Pakistan is the eighth most dangerous country for Christians, according to the 2025 World Watch List. Violating the blasphemy law could lead to a death sentence. In 2023, thousands of Muslims set fire to four churches and vandalized the homes of Christians over claims that two Christians had desecrated the Quran.
For the next 13 years, Omar’s family shared a 15-by-17-foot room, navigating the challenge of being unwanted guests in the Southeast Asian country. Thailand is not a signatory of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, meaning refugees and asylum seekers are treated as illegal immigrants until their resettlement. As a result, Omar’s father spent years in the city’s notorious Immigration Detention Center for holding an expired visa. Christianity Today agreed not to use Omar’s real name or details about his family due to fears of detainment and questioning by police.
Police eventually let Omar go, yet the subsequent COVID-19 lockdowns and the terror of being caught by police kept him from stepping out of his home for the next three years. “I got PTSD. … I was so afraid,” Omar said. “What if they come? What if they see me? What if they’re downstairs?”
He contemplated ways to end his life and prayed that he wouldn’t wake up the next morning. As he had stopped going to school, he idled away his time playing video games and contemplating his life. He had nearly lost all hope when an American woman from his church came to his family’s home to pick up some sewing from his mother. With her help, he began to step back outside—working out at the gym, finishing his GED, and returning to church.
Across the world in a small town near Amarillo, Texas, Mike and Kathie Jackson had spent the past 11 years financially and emotionally supporting Omar’s family and seeking ways to help them get to a safe country. Since befriending Omar’s father while visiting their daughter’s family in Bangkok, they have partnered with Freedom Seekers International (FSI), an organization that seeks to rescue persecuted Christians. They’ve written to senators and the US State Department, contacted agencies, and even helped Omar’s family apply to resettle in Canada.
Yet none of these avenues have worked. Omar’s family faces an additional challenge: While they initially received UNHCR refugee status, several years later the organization revoked it after disputing the details of the family’s claim.
Last year, when the State Department began allowing US citizens to form local sponsorship groups to help specific immigrants resettle in the US through the Welcome Corp, the Jacksons immediately applied. With the help of their church, First Baptist Church Canyon, they raised $2,500 per member of Omar’s family, filled a garage with donated furniture, and talked to community members about hiring Omar’s father and sending Omar and his siblings to West Texas A&M University. FSI would help fund an additional three months of the family’s resettlement after they arrived. In June, their application was approved, and all that was left was for the family to wait for an interview in Bangkok before they could arrange a flight to the US.
But in January, the Trump administration suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program and, a month later, terminated the Welcome Corp program.
“Our hopes got shattered again,” Omar said.
For other persecuted Christians FSI is trying to help, Trump’s pause on refugee resettlement has had even more dire consequences, including for 50 Afghan Christians whom the group is moving from safehouse to safehouse in Pakistan to elude authorities who would deport them back to Afghanistan.
At the same time, FSI has also been working to help 100 Christians from Central Vietnam who have escaped to Bangkok get resettled in the US. Five of these families from the Montagnard ethnic minority had sponsors and, like Omar’s family, were going through the Welcome Corp process to be resettled in East Texas.
“We’ve already submitted [applications],” said Deana Brown, founder and CEO of FSI. “We have funding. We have places for them to live. We have vehicles. … Everything’s ready. We’re just waiting for the program to run.”
But then on February 23, Thai officials arrested a group of Montagnard Christian refugees in Bangkok as they attended a memorial service organized by the wife of Y Quynh Bdap, Montagnard activist and founder of Montagnards Stand for Justice (MSJ). His extradition case is going through the Thai court system. The Vietnamese government labels MSJ a terrorist group.
In the group of arrested Christians, three families—a total of 16 people—were part of FSI’s cases.
Currently, the Thai government is holding 48 Vietnamese Christians in Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Center, according to Tim Conkling, an American missionary who partners with FSI.
The center suffers from “severe overcrowding,” a 2024 report found, while former detainees report abuse, lack of hygiene, and limited health care. Among the Vietnamese detainees are four children, an elderly couple, and three pregnant women—including one who gave birth in the detention center on March 22.
Since these Christians’ detention, a local church agreed to raise bail money, which costs about $1,500 per adult, for 23 of them. FSI worked to raise bail for the rest of the group, and the Center for Asylum Protection, which provides legal support for UNHCR refugees, is facilitating the applications of the guarantors for the refugees and the payment of the bail money.
Beyond bail money, the groups also need to provide money to support the refugees since they won’t be able to work—if they are caught working illegally, they will be thrown back into the detention center, and the bail money won’t be returned.
This week, FSI and the other groups were able to raise the bail money for all 48 individuals. Now the groups are waiting for their guarantors’ paperwork to be accepted and the refugees to be released.
Brown, who voted for Trump, said she believes the administration is making these changes to the government “to get a better hold of what [the US is] doing as to be the most productive and the best for all around.” But at the same time, she’s disappointed in the ending of the refugee program and believes the government is “doing stupid.”
Some believe the Trump administration’s apparent lack of concern for international human rights and refugees has led Thailand to give in to the demands of neighboring countries like China. In late February, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs back to China, where the ethnic minority is severely persecuted, despite protests from the US, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Conkling believes the Vietnamese Christians’ arrests may be the result of current geopolitical conditions and the potential for a windfall for local authorities from the bail money.
“It looks to me like a financially motivated raid …[that] was furthered by the fact that the Thai government knows now that the US ain’t going to be there to help refugees,” he said.
Since Welcome Corp ended, the Jacksons and members of their church have sent letters and petitions to their senators, their congressmen, and Rubio to get Welcome Corp started again so they can bring Omar’s family to the US..
“We have seen the harm and what’s happened with all the illegal immigration,” Kathie Jackson said. “But the more you disapprove of illegal immigration, the more you should push and approve legal immigration.”
The Jacksons believe Welcome Corp was the best program available to refugees and asylum seekers. It’s cheaper than Canada’s resettlement program, the refugees go through vetting, US citizens sponsor the refugees and raise their own funds—at no cost to the government—and communities come alongside the newcomers. “People [have] invested and have raised funds, and they’ve prayed over it [and] provided furnishing,” Mike Jackson said. “There’s a lot going on in the community to try to make this happen.”
Recently, Omar said his friend’s dad, another Pakistani asylum seeker, died from a heart attack on the way to the market. It made Omar realize the futility of his life in Bangkok. “There’s just no life for us here,” he said.
Omar said he is hanging on to Isaiah 60:22, which says, “At the right time, I, the Lord, will make it happen” (NLT). He adds, “I hope it happens fast.”
“I can’t give up,” Omar said. “I’ve come a long way. I’ve been through a lot of suffering [and] hardship in my family. But I’ll try my best to do the best with my life.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article had the wrong last name for the Jacksons.
