Imagine being forced to leave your home overnight. Perhaps a new regime just classified you as an enemy of the state, or war and disaster left you no choice but to leave. You pack whatever you can carry, holding your family's hand tight, and step across borders, hoping someone on the other side will be there to help.
But what happens when that door to help is no longer there?
In January 2025, the U.S. State Department terminated over 10,000 foreign aid grants and contracts following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, halting all refugee resettlement and humanitarian aid.
Within days, 10,000 vetted refugees who had already completed initial screening and were approved had their flights canceled. On January 24, Stop Work Orders (SWOs) were sent to local nonprofits, suspending core refugee reception and placement (R&P) operations.
By January 26, the processing of Afghan Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) for approximately 2,000 Afghan allies, including interpreters, medics, and engineers who long supported U.S. forces, was paused, leaving many stranded in third countries, notably Pakistan, despite holding legal authorization to resettle in safety.
Soon, the Biden-era CHNV humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans was dismantled, rendering thousands newly undocumented overnight.
In less than a week, the Trump Administration's indefinite suspension of a decades-old "life-saving" system for protection collapsed. Displacing thousands of in-transit families and commitments of caseworkers, attorneys devoted their careers to helping the world's most vulnerable communities.
For years, Ochmaa Gantulga was among the first responders whom refugee families met upon their arrival in Seattle. As a frontline caseworker at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), she greeted families at SeaTac airport with hot meals, assisted with housing, enrolled kids in school, and picked up 10 PM phone calls from clients after years in refugee camps.
"My work has been, and always will be, my ikigai," Ochmaa Gantulga, intake coordinator at the IRC Seattle, said, "This is the purpose of my life."
Among hundreds of Refugee Resettlement Agencies (RRAs), the IRC has been at the frontline of humanitarian aid since its founding in 1933 with the support of Albert Einstein. The Seattle office has been the nation's busiest, resettling around 10,000 refugees annually through a federally mandated 90-day resettlement cycle.
During a three-month cycle, each family from war-torn zones typically receives a one-time grant, often less than $1,650, to cover medical, education, food, rent, and utilities, a setup designed towards self-sufficiency.
But following the January shutdown, the office has remained quiet amid a new wave of mass contract terminations, vanishing these safety nets.
Half of the IRC's Seattle staff were laid off, and case files for pregnant moms, trauma survivors, and unaccompanied minors were left incomplete. Placing primarily women-led households at risk of homelessness, disabling conditions, and barriers to public benefits.
"I remember the moments the cuts were officially made," Gantulga said. "The entire staff was speechless, devastated, heartbroken with concerns for clients and families."
On April 25, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed eligibility resettlement review to 12,000 refugees with verifiable travel plans, ordering 160 to be promptly admitted while the rest remain patient for case-by-case review by a court-appointed "special master."
A coalition of organizations, including Church World Service (CWS), the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), HIAS, and Lutheran Community Services Northwest (LCSNW), filed suit in Pacito v. Trump.
In Washington, the state responded with the $20 million Washington Migrants and Asylum-Seeker Support (WA MASS) Project, filling gaps for displaced families excluded from federal aid, often due to pending status.
Since mid-2024, about 50% of WA MASS funds have been allocated to emergency and transitional housing, prioritizing the most vulnerable families and pregnant moms. The rest cover urgent legal navigation and case management to reach self-sufficiency.
"IRC is at the center of this project, standing with 22 other local organizations," Ochmaa said. "We're all working on this project, and I'm glad to see a project like this is bringing hope and light to serve the most vulnerable families and children in Washington."
Still, it's not enough.
According to John Miller, Client Intake Interviewer at the IRC Seattle, the greatest fear among clients today is housing assistance.
"Families who were promised six months of housing assistance are now getting only two months," Miller said, "They don't know how they'll make rent, most of them are already at risk of eviction."
According to Somali Youth and Family Club and Muslim Housing Services, despite housing 134 new arrival families in 2019, the majority were ineligible for emergency local homelessness prevention services due to a lack of eviction records and inability to meet the landlord's strict documentation criteria.
In between systems, these families weren't eligible enough to be qualified as homeless, nor to stay in their homes, placing them in line for eviction when their lease expires.
The former IRC housing team suggests expanding flexible client assistance and offering credit-building and financial literacy workshops to prevent cascading evictions and long-term instability.
According to Building Changes, the Washington Youth & Families Fund awarded each grantee agency $400,000 in system innovation grant funding and $30,000 in flexible client assistance annually, stabilizing high-risk households in Washington state. This proves that small, targeted investments can prevent homelessness and sustain public dollars over time.
But now the question is, who will remain to do this work when the infrastructure is left permanently "out of service"
Globally, humanitarian aid agencies like IRC have been responding to the worst humanitarian crisis, aiding 34.5 million displaced individuals, treating 721,000 children for malnutrition, and enrolling over 1.5 million in schools, responding to disasters in Sudan, Pakistan, and Syria within 72 hours.
However, given the damage done in Washington, the uncertainties over crisis aid resources will remain for years to come.
Lindsay Kim is an administrative officer, caseworker, legislative & research assistant, and freelance student journalist studying at the University of Washington.
Lindsay is a student in Hugo Balta's solutions journalism class. Balta is the Fulcrum's executive editor. The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.