New refugees in Washington are promised 90 days of support. A Trump order ended that

When refugees arrive in the U.S., they’re promised 90 days of assistance: help paying for rent, food, and winter coats — help enrolling in school and ESL classes, finding a doctor.

But on Friday, Jan. 24, refugee resettlement organizations received a memo to stop helping refugees and not incur any new expenses.

“We were shocked,” said Medard Ngueita, the executive director of World Relief Western Washington. “It’s really heartbreaking, and it’s not who we are as a nation.”

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During his first term, President Donald Trump stopped bringing new refugees into the country, but he did not end help for refugees already here. That’s a new policy.

Ngueita said his organization alone has 470 refugees in Western Washington who are still eligible for assistance that they now won’t receive.

“We're talking about families that we are being asked to leave on the side of the street, and that's what we refuse to do,” Ngueita said.

The memo arrived late in the day on a Friday, and near the end of the month.

“We [had] rents that were due at the end of the month for February,” Ngueita said. “We had people who — some of them were in hotels and Airbnbs that we cannot pay for them to remain in, and so we had to move people out of hotels; we had to move people out of Airbnbs.”

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Ngueita said World Relief scrambled to move some families into host homes, and to pay rent for others using donations instead of federal funds.

Refugee organizations across the state and country are in the same situation, said Sarah Peterson, Washington state’s refugee coordinator.

“I did speak to many of the resettlement agencies about [housing] specifically,” she said, “and they all worked to make sure that their housing costs for all of their refugees were covered under some manner.”

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But Peterson said not all the agencies she contacted have been able to weather the disruption through other funding sources.

“Unfortunately, we have heard that some organizations… have started a furlough process,” she said. “If the stop-work order continues for an extended length of time… they may have to actually permanently lay off people.”

Refugee organizations are looking for ways to request waivers or otherwise protest Trump’s refugee stop-work order.

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