Hundreds of refugees set to resettle in Spokane could be stopped by day-one executive orders from Trump administration

President Donald Trump’s day-one executive orders stopping the flow of refugees into the United States could prevent hundreds from coming to Spokane this year and threaten the funding of the resettlement agencies that help them.

Just hours after Trump assumed office Monday, he signed an executive order halting the nation’s refugee resettlement program effective Jan. 27 until the president determines that restarting the program “is in the interests of the United States.”

This puts a stop to all new refugees from coming to the country for at least 90 days, though local refugee aid organizations worry it will drag into the foreseeable future.

“We have the last Trump administration to compare it to, and he was very determined to shut down refugee resettlement altogether,” said Christi Armstrong, executive director for World Relief Spokane, one of two local agencies contracted by the federal government to resettle refugees in the community.

“We are preparing for a worst-case scenario and hoping for the best,” she added.

World Relief’s current contract and federal funding runs through the end of September, with a proposed resettlement of 750 people by the end of the fiscal year. Just over 300 have arrived thus far through World Relief, meaning about 450 who would have otherwise been brought to Spokane will be in limbo during these pauses.

“One of the most heartbreaking things about this is we have people in Spokane who may have families still in their country, in a refugee camp, who are waiting to come,” Armstrong said.

A protracted pause in resettlement could also drastically reduce the funding that organizations such as World Relief receive in the next contract cycle. During the last Trump administration, as annual refugee resettlements dropped from over 100,000 to roughly 12,000 in 2020, dozens of resettlement agencies closed shop or suspended their services.

“Come the next fiscal year, the refugee resettlement funding could be completely gone,” Armstrong said.

Mark Finney, executive director at Thrive International, a local organization that does not resettle refugees but assists those brought here by World Relief and the Spokane-chapter of the International Rescue Committee, argued the order was based on false pretenses.

“There’s no fact-based evidence to support any of the claims that refugees drain resources, are a security threat or are a burden on their communities,” Finney said.

The executive order paints refugees on the whole as a drain on the government that could “compromise the availability of resources for Americans,” which Finney argued the administration knows is not true.

“A lot of the language in the executive order unfairly characterized refugees and other immigrants in negative ways that don’t match the reality, in ways even this administration knows is false,” Finney said.

He pointed to a 2017 study commissioned by the Trump administration to assess the long-term fiscal impact of refugees in the United States, following numerous legal challenges to his first-year immigration travel bans.

A report released by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2017 noted that costs for the agency’s various programs were higher on average for refugees, $3,300, than for the rest of the U.S. population at around $2,500. An earlier draft report, however, found that refugees also paid $63 billion more in federal, state and local taxes than the cost of their use of government services; this data showing a net positive was not included in the final report presented to the public, but was instead leaked to the New York Times.

“As for the danger of them coming here, they’re safe, vetted by multiple, multiple U.S. agencies including Homeland Security, the FBI, DHS – they go through all of that vetting before they step foot on U.S. soil,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t make sense to me that we would think of them as people coming to do harm.”

A 2017 analysis by the bipartisan think tank New American Economy found that overall crime rates dropped in nine of the 10 U.S. cities with the largest influx of refugees relative to their population.

There also has not been a single fatal terrorist attack committed by a refugee in the United States since the modern resettlement program began in 1980, according to the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, estimated the risk of an American being killed in a terrorist attack committed by a refugee was 1 in 3.3 billion per year.

The odds of being struck by lightning in the United States, by comparison, is closer to one in a million, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sam Smith, director of immigrant legal aid for the Spokane-based Manzanita House, said his team has shifted its efforts toward immigrants and refugees already in the United States in anticipation of the new administration’s policies. For refugees, this largely includes filing the legal paperwork to seek permanent residency.

He expects those cases to be slowed considerably, both due to slow-rolling by the federal government and also as his team slows their applications because they “expect less understanding if there is a complication with a case.”

He noted a case he had worked on for World Relief during the last Trump administration, when a refugee had claimed a leg injury in his refugee paperwork and an ankle injury in his filing for permanent residency.

“That was a discrepancy that started them to look at picking away at their basis of refugee status,” Smith said. “It’s one of those things that caused extra anxiety and more processing time for our client. We want to avoid those – I hesitate to even call it a discrepancy.”

Aside from the logistical challenges, Smith said he is already seeing a spike in anxiety and fear in his clients. Smith pointed to another executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, which the Trump administration argues is not protected by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s one of those things that’s a pretty clear statement to disfavored groups by the administration that contributes to fear and anxiety,” Smith said. “Even if it is on its face an order that violates the Constitution and will not be implemented, it’s a statement of intent, of what they want to do.”

Another executive order signed Monday would end all “categorical parole programs that are contrary to the policies of the United States established in my Executive Orders …”

Trump specifically included programs that allow refugees to flee to the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but it’s not immediately clear whether that could impact Ukrainian refugees in the Spokane area who fled Russia’s invasion through a parole program, which was extended last February, Armstrong said.