More than 500 people participated in the Race for Refugees in St. Louis on Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021 in Tower Grove Park (Rebecca Rivas/Missouri Independent).
While our government ramps up its hiring of immigration enforcement officers and “makes America safe again,” let me tell you about a family I know.
I have written about them here before. They are eight global citizens who fled their homeland in the midst of a civil war. They waited years in a refugee camp and jumped through all the hoops required to obtain legal refugee status in the United States.
When they arrived in Kansas City in January, we thought they were the lucky ones. In a world of displacement and conflict, they had joined the sliver of refugees selected to find safety and opportunity here.
Twelve days after this family’s arrival, Donald Trump was inaugurated and America became a different country.
As a member of a team volunteering with a resettlement agency for this family, I’ve had a front row seat to the cruelty that the Trump administration has inflicted on people whose only mistake, if you can call it that, was to arrive here with hope.
As one of his first acts in office, Trump cut off all refugee admissions (except for a small number of white South Africans). He also froze federal funding for families who were already here.
In the wake of that shocking news, the resettlement agency that my team works with was forced to lay off nearly half its staff.
We worried about who would pay the rent on the small house where the family lives. Fortunately, charitable donors came through and the bills got paid.
In the anxiety-filled first months of this year, as we worked to enroll teenagers in school and escorted adults to literacy classes and job fairs, I gained a new appreciation for two services: SNAP and Medicaid.
The family I was involved with had no source of cash. Possibly because of the political climate, jobs were hard to come by. My team helped out with necessities, like toilet paper. The saving grace was an EBT card that allowed family members to go to a grocery store like everyone else and purchase healthy food through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Refugees qualify for SNAP because, up until now, they arrived with “qualified” immigration status. SNAP has never been available to undocumented immigrants.
The same is the case with Medicaid. My family could go to the Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center in Kansas City — a place I will forever applaud for the professionalism and kindness of its staff — and be screened for illness, receive prescriptions and get dental checkups.
(Note to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.: The water at the refugee camp was not fluoridated; one of the teenagers had 22 cavities.)
Spring and summer brought some better news. The federal government coughed up a bit of cash assistance. Della Lamb Community Services, the resettlement agency, found jobs for the two male adults in the family. It is hard work, in the food processing industry, but they are elated to have paychecks.
And then, on July 4, Trump signed the absurdly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
If you are looking for evidence of America’s turn to meanness and isolation, it is right there in the new law. Which was passed, by the way, with the votes of every Republican member of Missouri’s Congressional delegation. That includes Sen. Josh Hawley, who spent weeks yapping about how unwise it would be to cut Medicaid funding, before he voted to do exactly that.
OBBBA quadruples the amount of money that can be spent on facilities where immigrants, including children, can be detained indefinitely. It provides approximately $32 billion to supercharge the hiring of ICE agents to round up immigrants and terrorize entire communities.
And it makes newly arrived refugees and asylees ineligible for SNAP benefits and Medicaid coverage.
“The bill is, without a doubt, unprecedented in the harm it will cause refugee and other immigrant communities,” the resettlement and advocacy group Global Refuge declared after the vote.
There’s more. The bill significantly increases the fees that lawful immigrants must pay to enter the United States and maintain legal status. Refugees and others — who generally arrive here penniless — will now have to pay $550 for the precious employment authorization cards that enable them to work. The cards must be renewed every six months, at a cost of $275.
In other words, refugees will have to pay to work. They will work grueling and tedious jobs and pay taxes for their labor, yet they will be ineligible for the government benefits that enable their families to survive.
The provisions in the big, terrible bill, if left unchanged, will effectively end America’s long history of welcoming refugees and asylees. There will be no need for Trump or any president to cap admissions because no refugee will be able to survive without food assistance or health care. I assume that is the point.
As things now stand, refugees and other lawful immigrants will become part of the 220,000 Missourians who will lose Medicaid coverage in October 2026. The SNAP cutoff will happen almost immediately.
My six-month volunteer commitment with my refugee family has technically ended, so I do not know if they are aware of the changes that are coming.
Like all refugees, this family is resilient. I have watched them meet challenges in amazing ways.
They are fearful, though, about their future in a nation that no longer extends a hand to the rest of the world. I share their dread.
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This post was originally authored and published by Barbara Shelly from Missouri Independent via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
