ST. LOUIS – Mawda Altayan recalled the moment she learned that funding for refugee resettlement in her community would be frozen due to a decision by President Donald Trump.
“It’s very stressful,” she said. “Everyone cried.”
Altayan came to the United States in 2016 as a refugee from Syria. She had spent two years in Egypt before she resettled in St. Louis. She remembers what those early days of her arrival were like and how she has since worked to contribute to the St. Louis area.
“I work so hard to like to add something to this community,” she said, noting some of the pushback immigrants can get when they resettle in the United States. “We come here to do something good, we want to add something good to the community and to make it a better place.”
When she first arrived, Atalyan got support from the city’s International Institute, which has been assisting and supporting immigrants resettling in the St. Louis area since 1919. Faced with Trump’s decision to pause federal funding for refugee resettlement agencies, part of a review of foreign aid programs, the organization furloughed 60 percent of its staff. The move sent shock waves through the community.
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“We are deeply saddened knowing how this will affect the families we serve, as well as dozens of individuals and their families who rely on their employment at the International Institute. Unfortunately, we do not have an effective end date to this furlough, but we hope to be able to bring back staff and get our operations back to normal quickly, upon the release of federal funds and hopefully an uptick in private donations from our community members,” Krissy Durant, the organization’s director of communications, said in a statement released early February.
There are more than 250,000 immigrants in Missouri, making up about 4 percent of the population. More than 5,000 refugees arrived in the state over the last few years, according to the Missouri Office of Refugee Admission, and many of them have resettled around St. Louis and Kansas City.
“These people, they came looking for a good future here. They came here to feel that because we lost our country. So we are looking for a safe place to make it as our country,” Atalyan said. “We came here to make a good future for our kids, to work hard, to do something good for the community. We are not bad people.”
Jessica Bueler (left), executive director of Welcome Neighbor STL, and Mawda Altayan (right). Photo courtesy of Welcome Neighbor STL.
Today, Atalyan is a U.S. citizen, and she spends her days helping to settle refugees and feed unhoused people in the city she now calls her home. One of her favorite things to do is to make meals from her homeland for the people she serves. She loves to make everything from balaclava to chicken shawarma, though she said it’s hard to choose a favorite Syrian food.
She only uses the freshest ingredients because, for her, food is love.
Atalyan now works part-time for Welcome Neighbor STL, a community support group for refugee and immigrant families who call St. Louis home. The organization, founded in 2016, has a staff of about 15 people. Executive Director Jessica Bueler said since the funding freeze was announced, the group has seen some really low lows and some really high highs.
“This is a scary time for us because we don’t know what this looks like moving forward,” she told PBS News.
Like many other resettlement groups, Welcome Neighbor STL accesses their funds through a reimbursement model. On the 15th of each month, the group submits its records from the previous month to the Missouri Office of Refugee Resettlement. But recent events have made this process difficult.
“We did get December’s report approved, and we have been told that the check is in the mail, but we don’t know what’s going to happen for January. We don’t know what’s happening to February and for all these months to come,” Bueler said.
Laila Ayub, an immigration attorney, told PBS News that organizations nationwide are facing these types of financial challenges – not knowing how long they will be able to stay open. According to an NPR analysis, more than 22,000 people providing relocation services have been laid off so far and millions of dollars in funding have yet to be dispersed.
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Ayub is co-director of Project ANAR, an organization that focuses on legal and other services for refugees nationwide. For the last few years, it has helped Afghans attain permanent status in the U.S., while also advocating for the expansion of pathways for those seeking refuge. But today, like many groups who aid immigrants and refugees, the organization is trying to figure out how it could scale down and adjust if it had to operate with less funding.
“As our organization is processing our funding changes… everyone on our team’s immediate question is like, ‘What about all the people that we’re working with and the people who reach out every week?’” she said.
For Bueler, after the initial disbelief, she set to work “trying to figure out how we were going to continue servicing these refugees, how we were going to keep our staff employed and what we were going to do to try to reach out to the community, to see how we could stay afloat.”
This moment of uncertainty led them back to their community in St. Louis. They decided to launch a fundraiser with the goal of raising $100,000, which would go toward paying salaries for the next three months. As of now, they’ve been able to exceed that amount with more than $120,000 in donations. “So when I say tremendous ups and downs, you can see what I’m referring to,” she added.
Mawda Altayan teaching culinary students at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. Photo courtesy of Welcome Neighbor STL
According to Bueler, these sums weren’t generated from large thousand-dollar donations, but instead from individual donations of $5, $25 or $100.
As the organization works to navigate the new funding and landscape, she said it has also watched new refugees learn of the sweeping federal changes in real time. On the Friday before the inauguration, Bueler said Welcome Neighbor received two families to help resettle. She remembers how they felt learning that some of the families that they met in refugee camps along the way would not be able to resettle in America alongside them, like they had planned.
“It’s very difficult for those families to hear. It’s difficult for them to be able to process that,” Bueler said. “They’re very grateful. They’re very thankful that they were able to make it. But also in an era of uncertainty and now not knowing, ‘Am I welcome here? What is life going to be like for our kids now that we moved here? Are we going to be safe here or are we physically safe in our communities?’ … I think that there’s a lot of questions surrounding that,” she said.
For now, Ayub is also fundraising in the short term. She hopes that as a small group, they will be able to stay open to provide legal services for a few months. However, she said that while the flow of money has changed for many, the need has only grown.
“There’s so many instances where someone reaches out and they have a critical deadline and we help them file something, [but] because of all the policy changes, there’s more people in urgent situations and it’s already difficult for many service providers to keep up with that and now it’s even harder,” she said.
Ayub recalls a community outreach event Project ANAR held in January where it met with 150 immigrants and refugees, connecting them with different resources. But after recent government staffing and funding cuts, she said, “suddenly many of the people that they met with may not even be working out those agencies anymore.”
