At least 2,600 refugees living in the Rochester area could have their status re-evaluated under the latest directives from the Trump administration.
“And some may think that's just being prudent, right?” said Jim Morris, who oversees family prosperity programs with Catholic Charities Family and Community Services.
But this reassessment, he said, “is being undertaken by a government that's clearly hostile to them. The administration statements are not nuanced on this topic.”
The reassessment of refugees already admitted to the country, along with curtailing their work authorizations, comes in the wake of an Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard service members in Washington D.C. One died; the other was gravely wounded.
“All of us are horrified at this senseless loss” Morris said. “But you know, if and when a motive is uncovered, it's going to tell us something more about that person. But it's not going to tell us anything about refugees, or Afghans, or immigrants in general.”
Trump’s ire of late also has focused the Somali population, stemming from the arrest of dozens in a Minnesota fraud scheme broken up during the Biden administration. The scheme allegedly stole tens of millions in pandemic relief dollars by wildly overstating how many meals were being served to children. The convicted mastermind is white.
“We’re at a tipping point,” Trump said last week. “I don’t know if people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other. And we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
Officials have said their focus would be those refugees admitted during the Biden administration, between 2021 and 2025.
Catholic Charities used to be the area’s largest refugee resettlement agency until the Trump administration effectively ended the program nationwide. Rochester has welcomed an estimated 17,000 refugees over the past 40 years, most of those resettled by Catholic Charities. That includes upward of 2,000 Somali adults and children.
Twelve hundred Afghan refugees resettled in Rochester just over the past five years.
“Refugees, by definition, have no place to call home,” Morris said. “They have suffered persecution. They have suffered war, violence. They’ve been told, ‘You don’t belong.’ They’re state-less.
“And the U.S. refugee program has historically been a message that we will claim you as one of ours,” he continued. “We'll give you a new start in life, a place that you can call home. That's been a wonderful gift. But this move by the administration to go back and revisit their original adjudication of their refugee claim, that's unconscionable.”
In Minnesota, Trump included the state’s Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is Somali, in his criticisms. But Omar, during an appearance Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” responded that blaming the Somali community for the actions of a few is misguided. Minnesota is home to nearly 80,000 people of Somali descent, the largest Somali-American population in the country.
"We also could have benefited from the program and the money that was stolen," she said. "And so it's been really frustrating for people to not acknowledge the fact that we're, you know, we're also, as Minnesotans, as taxpayers, really upset and angry about the fraud that has occurred."
Catholic Charities continues to support refugees through a broad set of post-resettlement programs focused on helping them become self-sufficient. That includes a significant amount of employment work. But staff and resources increasingly are flowing toward legal assistance as the administration ramps up its crackdown on legal immigration.
" That's one of the highest needs of our community right now,” Morris said. “If we weren't doing that, we would be doing more things like maybe acculturation or employment or refugee health services.”
The details of what and how the administration plans to move forward on evaluating recently arrived refugees, and handling work authorizations that will need to be renewed every 18 months or less, instead of five years, has yet to be explained.
