The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by David Katibah, was published June 18, 2026 on religionnews.com. It has been edited for length and Banner style. The Banner added a sentence to the third paragraph and added the last paragraph to provide context for the Christian Reformed Church.
About 5.4 million people became refugees in 2025. With the global total eclipsing more than 35 million refugees—not including the 69 million internally displaced persons—resettlement remains a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable communities.
For more than four decades, the U.S. has been on the front lines of that process. But in 2025, the U.S. only resettled 11,500 refugees, a sharp drop from the more than 100,000 in 2024. In 2026, the number so far is less than 6,000—all of them from South Africa.
June 20 has been recognized by the United Nations since 2001 as World Refugee Day. World Renew, the relief and development agency of the Christian Reformed Church, asks congregations to select a Sunday in June to remember and support refugee sponsorship and resettlement.
In light of ongoing changes to U.S. immigration and refugee policy, Religion News Service asked faith-based resettlement organizations what communities of faith should know.
The U.S. refugee program has been suspended in recent years.
The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, a bipartisan effort established in the wake of the fall of Saigon, has been drastically diminished. Some of the most vulnerable communities in the world are now barred from seeking entry into the United States.
But many Christians are not aware, said some of the major faith-based refugee resettlement agencies.
“The average person in the average church I go to has no idea that the refugee resettlement program has been shut down,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, who spoke to Religion News Service.
The change in policy has meant these agencies have had to make major staffing and programming adjustments. Some of them have survived the termination of significant U.S. grant funding. But more importantly, they say, the change has felt like an abandonment of these needy communities.
In fiscal 2026 (which began Oct. 1, 2025), the vast majority of refugees who have been resettled are white Afrikaners, a minority community from South Africa. Persecuted Christians and other religious minorities, who have historically been a priority for the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program—such as through the Lautenberg Program—are no longer given special consideration.
“We’re unfortunately quite confident that zero Christian refugees from countries where Christians are known to face persecution will come to the United States as refugees this year, down from more than 29,000 two years ago,” said Soerens.
Despite the restrictions by the current administration, most Protestant pastors, according to a 2026 poll run by Lifeway research and sponsored by World Relief, prefer a much wider net for refugee admissions. Only 18% of responding pastors identified Afrikaners as a priority for refugee resettlement.
On the other hand, 70% of pastors identified those who have fled persecution and have family members already in the U.S. as a priority.
Families have been separated, and more families are at risk of separation.
Many of the individuals who come to the U.S. are hoping to chart a path for their families, said Matt Misterek, director of communications at Lutheran Community Services Northwest, one of the plaintiffs in an ongoing case against the U.S. government’s refugee restrictions.
“When individuals come, they’re often almost always here to put their front foot forward with the hope that in fact they’re going to be able to reunite with their families in the United States,” said Misterek.
Family reunification is considered a priority by Congress, especially uniting children with their families that are already stateside. But plaintiffs in the case allege exceptions to the refugee ban are being made for South African refugees and not others. Including a 9-year-old boy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who although his parents and siblings are already in the U.S., is waiting alone in Burundi.
“These actions are discriminatory, cruel, and arbitrary,” said Mevlüde Akay Alp, senior litigation attorney for International Refugee Assistance Project and lead attorney in the case against the selective application of the refugee ban. The boy’s family is a new plaintiff in an amended complaint put forth by IRAP.
Some refugees already in the U.S. could be in jeopardy.
The arrest, detention, and questioning of some refugees legally in the U.S. but picked up as part of increased mobilization of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has put them at risk of a “revetting” process, which could result in revocation of their permanent status. A federal judge has ordered the administration to pause these detentions.
“This is one of the instances where there is a really fundamental attempt to transform the nature of immigration and refugee resettlement in the U.S. in ways that we haven’t previously seen,” said Noah Gottschalk, chief external relations officer at HIAS, the world’s oldest refugee resettlement agency.
Refugees admitted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program already go through one of the most stringent vetting processes in the world. Revetting creates what Gottschalk called a “climate of fear, a climate of confusion.”
Caring for refugees is a spiritual concern.
For HIAS, caring for refugees is not altruism; it’s an outgrowth of a deeply felt experience.
“We are motivated as we are, by our Jewish values, by the Jewish experience of being persecuted, of being discriminated against for who we are and what we believe,” said Gottschalk.
In June of 1939, the St. Louis, a ship carrying nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, was refused entry into the U.S. Forced to return to Europe, 254 of its passengers were eventually murdered in the Holocaust.
For HIAS, remembering this tragedy is an inspiration to welcome refugees today.
People of faith have stepped up.
Many people of faith have done that and more in the past two years. Synagogues, mosques, and churches have all met the gap in her community, said Milagro Sique, CEO of Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, which is not itself a faith-based organization.
DIIRI was the primary plaintiff in a case challenging the U.S. administration’s November 2025 freeze on asylum applications from 39 specific countries. In June a federal judge ruled those actions of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were “contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious."
Some church members have even gone to great lengths to assist refugees impacted by the recent policies.
In the Christian Reformed Church, leaders have called for and hosted prayer, churches redistributed funds to already present refugees who might be in need, and pastors have visited detention centers in Montgomery, Texas, helped parishioners navigate difficult circumstances, and even faced their own detention.
c. 2026 Religion News Service