Rebuilding refugee resettlement to make it better than it was under Trump—or Obama
“The last four years were incredibly hard. But we also know that the system was not perfect four years ago.”
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service president and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah is a native of Sri Lanka who came to the United States as a nine-month-old refugee. She served in the Obama administration as a part of the First Lady’s Let Girls Learn initiative and coordinated refugee programs for the State Department. She joined LIRS as president in 2019. LIRS is one of nine private, mostly faith-based organizations that partner with the federal government to resettle refugees.
What have the last four years been like for a refugee resettlement agency?
Suffice it to say that the last four years have been a concerted effort to decimate the refugee resettlement system in the United States. We saw it first in the cuts to the refugee resettlement ceiling: setting a record low number became an annual tradition for the administration, ultimately leading to an 85 percent cut in refugee admissions.
