More than 1,000 refugees across upstate New York are worrying about how they will pay their rent and get work authorization after the federal government froze funding to resettlement agencies that support them.
Leaders of agencies in Utica and Albany told Gothamist that President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending new refugee admissions forced them to lay off staff who had been helping newcomers acclimate to life in the United States. The order and subsequent directives from the State Department froze federal funding that nonprofits use to pay their employees and cover rent and household goods for recently arrived refugees, leaving the organizations scrambling.
“We’re just in rapid response mode,” said David Sussman, director of the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants office in Albany.
The organization has a federal contract to resettle refugees, who are legal immigrants who have been relocated to parts of the United States due to the risk of persecution in their home countries because of their race, religion or political activity.
The upstate groups help resettle thousands of people each year from countries such as Myanmar, Afghanistan, Congo, Eritrea and Pakistan. The newcomers have an outsize impact in communities where houses sit empty after deindustrialization hurt the local economy and drove population down.
USCRI’s Albany office, which opened in 2005, helps roughly 500 people a year. Among them is Muhammad Hanif, who was born in a part of northern Pakistan where sectarian violence is common.
Hanif spent 12 years at a refugee camp in Indonesia and arrived in Albany just before Christmas. He said he was working on applying for employment authorization with help from USCRI until the executive order came down, and his caseworker was laid off.
“ If we don't have the case officer, we cannot reach to our goal,” Hanif said. “We don't know nothing about process.”
To gain legal admission to the United States, refugees often spend years waiting for approval and demonstrating the dangers they face in their home countries. Once admitted, they are put on a path to citizenship. They differ from asylum-seekers, who are awaiting federal decisions on whether they will be granted permanent status.
Resettlement agencies are the first line of help for refugees, who often have only limited English proficiency. The organizations receive around $3,000 from the federal government to pay for newcomers’ basic necessities as well as caseworkers to help them enroll children in school and find jobs. Without this help, advocates say, refugees would be in an unfamiliar country with no assistance to become contributing members of a community.
At USCRI, about $1,650 covers the refugee’s expenses, like rent and household goods, in the first 90 days after their arrival. The rest covers the organization’s costs, including staff salaries. Without access to federal funds, Sussman said, he had to lay off seven of the office’s 45 employees.
The group’s office has filled with donations of cleaning supplies, food and diapers, which the remaining staff piled on the desks of laid-off workers. Sussman said that while people arrive in a steady stream, there are 155 refugees in their first 90 days whose assistance is now frozen.
“ To have this happen is really catastrophic,” said Shelly Callahan, executive director of the Center, a refugee resettlement agency in Utica. There, roughly 200 people have lost access to caseworkers and basic necessities.
The Jan. 24 stop-work order flowed from one of Trump’s early executive orders, which suspended new admissions of refugees. On his first day in office, the Republican president stated the country was “inundated” with immigrants.
“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” Trump wrote.
Jennifer Rizzo-Choi, executive director of the International Institute of Buffalo, pointed out that refugees are sometimes conflated with migrants who illegally cross into the United States and then seek asylum. Refugees remain overseas while being vetted by the government, which grants them permission to enter and puts them on a track toward citizenship.
“These are people who did wait in line to come here sometimes for many, many years,” she said.
In addition to Albany and Utica, there are refugee resettlement agencies in Binghamton, Syracuse and Rochester. Buffalo has four agencies and resettles the most refugees each year, Rizzo-Choi said. She said more than 700 new refugees in the Buffalo region were affected by the federal order.
Rizzo-Choi is calling on the state government to provide money in its next budget to replace the lost federal funding. In 2012, New York established the Office of New Americans, which oversees employment assistance and other programs that help refugees beyond their first 90 days.
The newcomers’ impact is particularly important in upstate cities that have grappled for decades with population loss, Rizzo-Choi pointed out. A 2023 study found 15,000 refugees have resettled in Buffalo since 2002 – significantly driving its population growth. Census figures show the overall population in the Queen City increased by around 17,000 between 2010 and 2020.
”Buffalo is enjoying a renaissance. And a lot of that is attributed to population growth and economic development that we hadn't seen in almost 50 years,” Rizzo-Choi said. “ Termination of a program that's been running since 1980 is going to really hit Buffalo hard."