In Connecticut, a refugee resettlement organization is grappling with the loss of federal funds it uses to help immigrants start their lives in the United States.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “Refugee resettlement in CT at risk as executive orders upend IRIS,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Laura’s story here.
WSHU: You tell the story of Rose Done, who arrived in Connecticut in 1999, and you use that to illustrate the intensive work Integrated Refugee and Immigration Services, or IRIS, does to resettle immigrants in Connecticut. Why do you think Done's story is so important right now?
LT: I wanted to tell the story of someone who had really built a life thanks to these programs and services, and just help readers understand one of the programs that is currently suspended and may not continue under the Trump administration, and just give people an idea of what this kind of program really is, what it does, who it impacts, and the fact that there's been a lot of support in recent years for these types of programs in Connecticut specifically. So I thought people would be interested just to get a better sense of the scope of a program like this and essentially what we're losing out on bringing people like Rose to Connecticut.
WSHU: Now, can you tell us about her experience and how she was integrated into society here?
LT: Yeah, absolutely. So Rose, she is from Nigeria, she left for a refugee camp when she was in her late teens. There was civil unrest in her region of Nigeria related to environmental degradation from oil spills and the exploitation of crude oil. And so she ended up being brought to Connecticut to join her husband, who had been a part of the protest movement, not even a particularly high profile person in that movement, just someone kind of caught up in this violence in his country. They came here when Rose was 20 years old, and they were greeted by this group that very quickly helped them get an apartment in Hartford, helped her husband find a job, helped Rose through her first pregnancy, then helped her find a job, helped her get into a nursing program to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a nurse, and they just really helped them every step of the way.
They also became part of a church community that was very supportive of them. So the members of that church also played a big role in just helping them with all the kinds of things that anyone might need help with when they move to a new place and don't know anyone, from getting a ride to a prenatal appointment or helping them master English. And it's really for her, the difference between what could have been an incredibly difficult change and journey to the success that they've really had here in building a life, owning a house and finding work. And now she is a nurse who's in charge of a 26 bed hospital unit, and has three children here who are all born here, and they've really made a great life here.
WSHU: Laura, you also say that IRIS has received recognition for innovation in the way it resettles refugees in Connecticut. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
LT: Yeah, I had a really interesting interview with a professor at the University of Connecticut, Kathryn Libal. She told me about this program called co-sponsorship that IRIS started during the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis. There was an influx of interest in IRIS from these different faith-based and community organizations who really wanted to get involved. Maybe they had done some resettlement work in the past, but now they saw these images on the news, and they really wanted to do what they could to help. And so IRIS actually created this method of training different groups like churches or even just a group of, you know, five or six people who might decide that they want to take this on, and they would help them to learn how, you know they could help enroll kids in school, help find them an apartment, all of these kinds of things that IRIS would normally do.
They found, Professor Libel was telling me, that one of the things that she found in her research was that this created a really interesting multiplier effective support, where you have these communities that take on a refugee to resettle, and because the church or a synagogue or a mosque is rallying around a person who's just arrived, they're able to crowdsource kind of and find out information, everything from a business leader in that community who can help find that person a job in their field to a question that might come up about resources for therapy for a trauma victim, they were able to, in her words, knit the fabric of civic life around these folks and help them forge a community and get on their feet even more effectively than Iris could do on its own. And this is something that's based on how Canada resettles refugees. But after IRIS started doing it in Connecticut, it was actually something that became adapted at the national level as well.
WSHU: So IRIS is an agency that has been operating in Connecticut for quite a while now, and they've had contracts with the federal government for decades. How much of the money comes from the federal government, and how much is actually going to be affected by Trump's stop order on asylum?
LT: So IRIS will see a hit to its funding from these stop-work orders to the tune of about $4 million. That is money that they were counting on to do the work of resettling people, some of whom are already here and have already started to work with them. Now, the money that they were counting on to do that work is gone. They also have historically depended somewhat on private fundraising, and so they are trying to fundraise and trying to ensure that they will be able to serve at least the people that are already here. However, IRIS has already laid off 20% of its employees over the past few weeks. It seems like the organization is seeing in its future that it's going to need to continue to shrink because, you know, if new refugees don't come in, then there's just kind of a way that this work shrinks down. You're still serving people who are already here, but the really intensive kind of work that they do to get this kind of funding for in the first 90 days to resettle people and kind of, you know, do all of those things that they need right away, from getting kids enrolled in school defining housing. If that work is no longer happening, then they're going to have to shrink quite a bit.
WSHU: So, has the state government stepped in in any way? What type of support does IRIS get from the state?
LT: Well, in general, people in this refugee program do benefit from things like SNAP benefits and other things that they may qualify for through DSS at the state level. So there is that type of support. I think, in general, there has been a tone of support from Governor Ned Lamont and Attorney General William Tong about this issue, and they see these people as equal members of our state, people who contribute. That sentiment was also echoed to me by the senators for Connecticut, Blumenthal and Murphy, and I think that there is sort of an understanding that the state benefits in a variety of ways from welcoming these folks in. There are people who are the most highly vetted group of immigrants that we have coming into the state. They are people who are often filling jobs like Rose did in needed areas like health care. So there are a lot of different ways that they're benefiting the economy, such as building businesses, opening restaurants, and other things like that. So there has been this kind of quality of support that, as Maggie Mitchell Salem, the executive director of IRIS told me, is just not something that you see in every state.
WSHU: And in the meantime, they have to count on private donations to keep the agency afloat.
LT: Yeah, so they've been doing a number of fundraisers. They've been doing, you know, their annual 5k, they've done vigils at churches, and I think that they're just hoping that this kind of network that IRIS has built up in the private philanthropy community and also in the faith-based community, will help to at least carry them through and be able to serve the people who are already here. But again, they can't control whether the Trump administration decides to stop bringing new refugees in altogether.
