Two years after arriving in the United States and 12 years after fleeing her native Somalia and arriving at an Ethiopian refugee camp, 80-year-old Hawo Jimale says she is struggling to afford her medicine and groceries.
Under a measure President Donald Trump signed into law last year, Jimale, like most newly arriving refugees, lost access to her federal food assistance. Under another Trump directive implemented earlier this month, she lost access to Medicaid.
Jimale, who has trouble moving around on her own and spends most of her time alone in her Columbus, Ohio, apartment, worries that next she will lose her Social Security benefits, her only source of income and the only way she can afford her rent.
Her social life has taken a hit, too. The Trump administration has terminated the Services to Older Refugees program that, through a local nonprofit, funded social events for seniors, such as a trip to the zoo. Jimale said she now questions whether she has done something wrong.
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“Why did they bring me here if they don’t help me?” Jimale asked through an interpreter.
The Trump administration formally rescinded money from the office carrying out refugee support programs at the end of September through pocket rescissions, a controversial budgetary maneuver that the government’s spending watchdog has deemed illegal. Overall spending on refugee support services has been cut by 80% since former President Joe Biden’s final year in office. Last fiscal year, the government spent $132 million on the now-eliminated programs focusing on students, mentorship, older refugees and health promotion.
“It came like a flash flood, without any warning,” said Jhuma Acharya, the family engagement and support coordinator for the Licking Heights school district just outside of Columbus.
The federal cuts to refugee programs have been devastating to families in his communities, Acharya said. “Without any announcement it comes, and then everyone is uprooted.”
Central Ohio has become a flash point in the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to restricting immigration, particularly after Vice President JD Vance accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield of eating pets. Ohio was accepting among the most refugees of any state before the administration decimated those efforts and began welcoming only white South Africans. Officials across the region now fear they will no longer have the resources to support the communities that have already arrived or integrate them into American society.
“Columbus has long been a resettlement city,” Lourdes Barroso de Padilla, a council member for the city, told The Washington Sun. The cuts to federal funding are making it “challenging to provide those other things that create that sense of belonging,” she said.
Acharya said families in his district took advantage of local organizations that offered federally funded youth mentorship, through which individuals would help refugee students with integration and educational goals.
“These kids are living in two different cultural worlds every day,” said Acharya, himself a refugee from Bhutan who arrived in the United States in 2011 after spending 19 years in a Nepalese camp. “They have to shift their brains two to three times per day.”
The mentors helped students perform those mental gymnastics, develop their language skills and navigate various bureaucratic processes.
Angie Plummer, executive director of Community Refugee and Immigration Services Ohio, the organization that led Jimale’s outings, said her organization has gone through “massive layoffs” since the start of Trump’s second term as federal funding has continued to dry up, which she said has had cascading fallout for the families it supports.
“They’ve been building up trust with the families,” Plummer said of the case workers she used to employ. Increasingly, she said, refugees are “left on their own to navigate all these systems.”
One former official in the Office of Refugee Resettlement said the agency’s spending enabled psychosocial adjustments for children who had experienced trauma.
“These are kids who may have witnessed their parents being killed in front of them,” the former official said, adding that ORR-backed programs helped children learn and achieve in the classroom. “All of that is gone now.”
The former official said that in years past, as the number of incoming refugees ebbed and flowed, funding would be reallocated to existing populations.
“Someone who arrived at age six and is now in third grade, they’re still leaning on things,” they said. “The trauma doesn’t go away in a year.”
A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which houses the Office of Refugee Resettlement that funded the canceled programs, said the agency will continue directing “available resources toward families and older refugees with the greatest needs.”
“ORR remains committed to this mission and works with states, resettlement agencies and communities to make effective use of available resources,” the spokesperson said. “ORR regularly reviews priorities, assesses needs and manages taxpayer dollars responsibly, while prioritizing entitlement spending for American citizens.”
In clawing back money for refugees this year, the White House said the ORR programs were “operated by pro-illegal immigration non-profits” and eliminating them would support the administration’s goal of “ending the use of federal taxpayer dollars to support non-citizens, putting Americans first.”
Tom Betti, a spokesman for Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services, said the state continues to receive funding for the federal refugee employment program and is “awaiting federal guidance on how states may use” existing funding set aside for students and older refugees.
Barroso de Padilla, the City Council member and a daughter of Cuban refugees, said the program cuts will impact the entire region.
“The number one thing behind our population growth is immigrants and refugees,” she said. “They’re helping to shape our cities, helping to shape our cultural scene, helping to shape our entrepreneurial scene.”
Those contributions are part of what motivates people to want to live in and around Columbus, she said. The waning federal support is forcing Columbus to make tough choices.
“When the federal government doesn’t do its job, when the state government doesn’t do its job, then it’s imperative for us to do that,” Barroso de Padilla said. “We are the last line of defense.”
Nirere Dancille arrived in the Columbus area recently with her daughter and granddaughter after fleeing war in their native Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She did not speak English and leaned on federally funded groups to make and get to medical appointments, find housing, put her grandchild in school, learn the language and go to events with other seniors.
“We feel home here now,” Dancille said through an interpreter. “We feel home because we feel peaceful and safe.”
Still, like Jimale, feelings of loneliness and isolation — and concern for how they will pay for their next meals or dose of medicine — have settled in.
Before the funding was cut off, Dancille traveled with other older refugees to an American history museum.
“We could not imagine the history of America,” she said. “We learned many things that helped us compare where we are to our homes.”
Plummer said her group has focused on helping refugees develop that sense of belonging. But without federal funding, she said, her organization will no longer be able to put on events like taking refugee seniors to a local park to play cornhole.
“All these Congolese people were doing a very American activity,” Plummer said.
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