Last week, a Nashville clinic welcomed two dozen refugees who arrived in vans along with their caseworkers.
Just as the ministry has done with hundreds of families—from places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syria—Siloam Health staff handed out coloring books to the kids and began talking with the parents through interpreters.
Then came the vitals checks, exams, and vaccines, all part of a medical screening that refugees go through during their first 90 days in the US so they can begin work or send their children to school.
But this time, Siloam’s leaders knew that their organization likely wouldn’t be reimbursed for its services. Under a new order from the Trump administration halting refugee arrivals and subsequent instructions pausing funds for refugees already approved for resettlement, everything has changed overnight.
Churches and ministries that serve refugees anticipated program cuts—refugee resettlement fell to record lows during Donald Trump’s previous term—but not to this extent. Now, ministries and churches that support refugees are scrambling to raise funds and fill in some of the gaps left by the sudden dearth of federal support.
“It’s always been a mix of public funds and private funds that make our settlement work,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief. “It needs to be all private at this point, and that’s a lot to cover.”
World Relief, which is the National Association of Evangelicals’ humanitarian arm and contracts with the government as a resettlement agency, has resettled about 4,000 people since November.
Typically, agencies would receive $3,000 per refugee in federal assistance to support people during their first 90 days, with the goal of having them in jobs so they could cover their own rent and necessities by month four. Church partnerships and volunteers help for around six months, supplementing the short window of eligibility for public aid.
But now, the agencies are scrambling to take care of it all on their own.
“You can do the math on covering rent for 4,000 people,” Soerens said.
In just a couple weeks, World Relief has received more than $1 million in donations, from more than 1,000 people. The organization estimates it will need $6 million to cover the shortfall for recent arrivals and has already had to make layoffs.
Six of the ten agencies that receive federal funding for refugee resettlement are faith-based; their supporters see caring for the stranger as a biblical imperative. Lifeway Research found in 2024 that over 70 percent of evangelical Christians believed the United States has a “moral responsibility” to accept refugees.
In Connecticut, a group of Protestant and Catholic churches, as well as a Jewish temple, collectively donated $10,000 to the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), which was ordered to turn off the tap of refugee aid within days of Trump taking office.
In Virginia Beach, piles of sofas, tables, and beds collected for a family arriving from Afghanistan sit in storage units rather than their new apartment. The family’s travel has been canceled, and New Life Church—a megachurch that had privately sponsored them—is left praying and waiting.
“We had kind of done everything that we could, up until the point of the family arriving,” said Ashley Whitlinger, mobilization coordinator for the church’s global team. “The government says, ‘Okay, here’s 90 days.’ But 90 days is nothing to restart your entire life in a brand-new country. … We all kind of had it in mind, like, we’re going to walk with this family at least for probably a year.”
The whole church rallied to help. Someone donated a car. Others contributed furniture. They raised nearly $50,000. Around 60 people said they wanted to be on call for additional help if needed. The team hosted weekly Wednesday night prayer calls and got regular updates from World Relief, the agency that was working with the Afghan family.
The Afghan refugees—a group of 14, including 9 children—remain stuck in Pakistan for now. They are fleeing Taliban retribution for serving in the Afghan special forces and the collapsed Afghan government. Before they escaped their home country, two of their family members had been killed, including a four-year-old boy who was kidnapped by Taliban fighters.
A couple family members have already arrived in the US, approved after two years of having parolee status. As Muslims, they were surprised that a church was praying for them and helping them.
“I see so many evangelical Christians praising and exulting and cheering on this kind of shock-and-awe approach—that’s the way I would characterize these executive orders,” said Doug Chandler, director of global outreach at New Life. “I don’t think people realize … thousands of individual families, their lives are being turned upside down yet again.”
When Chelsea Sobolik, who works in World Relief’s government affairs office, posted on X about Trump’s order, her comment section quickly proliferated with gleeful responses. Responses accused refugee agencies of breaking the law by bringing people in illegally and rejoiced to see the cuts.
Soerens is disturbed by the misinformation and, at times, vitriol directed at the program, which only serves refugees who have been approved by the government to come to the US.
He recalls a push in past years of Christian advocacy that took a very different approach. “It’s both meeting the American government’s secular interests, but also is allowing the church to be part of that process, and I think we should be proud of that,” he said.
Melody Slaton, a nurse turned associate pastor of missions and outreach at Sugar Land Baptist Church, saw her Texas neighbors go from questioning the legality of refugees to volunteering to help welcome them.
The church partners with World Relief and helped a family from Venezuela who, even after visiting Spanish churches in the area, made enough friends at Sugar Land Baptist that they joined the congregation.
Krista Kartson, the granddaughter of Ukrainian refugees, first saw the refugee crisis from overseas, with the Peace Corps in Ukraine and later with Samaritan’s Purse in Iraq. She saw communities burned to the ground in northern Iraq and heard from Christians and Yezidis who feared ISIS’s return to what was once their home.
“That really cemented in me the understanding that some people can return home and some simply can’t,” said Kartson, senior director for sponsorship initiatives with Welcome.US, which was formed as the US withdrew from Afghanistan.
She and her mother sponsored a Ukrainian mother and daughter so they could come to the US after the Russian invasion, and last year, she volunteered again to help another refugee family.
Last August, she and a group of eight other Christian women in her neighborhood applied for the Welcome Corps program, which allows groups of private citizens to do what resettlement agencies typically do: secure housing, find job opportunities, figure out the local school system, and find teachers of English as a second language, if necessary.
In January, Kartson’s group of women was matched with a refugee family from Venezuela: a father, mother, and infant son. The women met regularly to pray over the family and line things up, readying a basement apartment for their arrival.
When they got the news that the family would no longer be coming, the group of women met in person to pray and eat together, and they’re still holding hope that the family will one day arrive.
