State Department officials told Christian humanitarian organization World Relief to “stop all work” related to resettling foreigners as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration.
The nonprofit, which receives substantial federal funds for programs related to “refugee resettlement,” revealed on Saturday that the State Department asked them on Friday to pause their efforts for the “grant agreement that provides initial resettlement support to newly arrived refugees for the first several months of their lives in the United States.”
They were also asked to pause programs abroad in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development. The requests come days after President Donald Trump issued a new executive order mandating that no more foreign assistance funds “shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”
World Relief received over $126 million of federal grants in 2022 alone to execute such programs. Myal Greene, the chief executive of World Relief, said that the group is “heartbroken by these abrupt decisions when we consider the impacts on some of the most vulnerable individuals in the United States and around the world.” The nonprofit claimed that “refugee resettlement and foreign assistance” indeed bolster “American safety, strength, and prosperity.”
But many conservatives assert that the distribution of federal funds to religious nonprofits to expedite foreigners seeking entry into the United States, an activity which is often framed as humanitarian work centered on Christian values, instead incentivizes mass immigration. Republicans have proposed legislation to defund nonprofits that offer “refugee resettlement.”
William Wolfe, the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership and an appointee in the State Department during the first Trump administration, commented to The Sentinel that World Relief has indeed “been grifting off the largesse of taxpayer dollars for far too long.”
He contended that “if World Relief wants to advance open borders, amnesty, and the mass flow of unvetted migrants across the American border, they should do so on their own dime.”
“While World Relief claims that they are offering ‘humanitarian aid and assistance’ for refugee resettlement, the truth is that their advocacy and actions directly contribute to flooding America with unassimilated and unvetted migrants, many of which could pose a threat to the safety and well-being of American citizens,” Wolfe asserted. “President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have done the right and moral thing, the Christian thing, in pausing all refugee resettlement and foreign assistance programs: many of which, whether they intend to or not, facilitate mass illegal migration, human trafficking, and the sex trafficking of children.”
