‘We remain committed’: Local refugee resettlement group prepares for second Trump term

NINA MOINI: Well, about five weeks remain until President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office to begin his second term. Trump has vowed in his campaign to limit immigration to the US and carry out mass deportations. Those promises appealed to voters, some of them.

Today, we're going to focus on one way that people leave their home countries and arrive in Minnesota, which is refugee resettlement. During his first term, former president Trump cut the number of people who were allowed to enter under the country's refugee program, and those numbers have since rebounded due to the Biden administration. And the global pandemic was also going on around that time.

So here to talk about what is happening among private organizations that work on resettlement is Jocelyn Wyatt. She's CEO of the organization Alight, which is based partly in Minnesota. Welcome to the program, Jocelyn.

JOCELYN WYATT: Thanks so much for having me here today.

NINA MOINI: Can you briefly explain just how refugee resettlement works and how Alight is involved in helping people start their lives here in Minnesota?

JOCELYN WYATT: Of course. So refugee resettlement has been a long process that have recently experienced some great innovations. Just in the last couple of years has been the launch of a new program called Welcome Corps, which allows everyday citizens in small groups of five or more individuals or families to sponsor refugees and to allow them to come and start a new life in the US.

There's also the more traditional paths of refugee resettlement, where refugees would apply for status in their home country or a country that they had fled to. And there, they would be welcomed in and supported by a refugee resettlement agency. And so those paths have both been very robust over the past several years, and where we've been really excited to see what some of the new innovations have been in terms of private community, responsiveness, and welcoming and support of refugees, particularly coming into the state of Minnesota.

NINA MOINI: And you joined the organization in 2021. And that was a time when, again, refugee admissions were at the lowest level since the program was created in 1980. And that was partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But what was the state of the nation's resettlement infrastructure at that time?

JOCELYN WYATT: Yeah, I started at Alight almost exactly three years ago. And at the time, the US had opened its doors to particularly Afghan refugees. With the Taliban taking over power in Afghanistan, there were so many people, particularly those who had served alongside the US military, who no longer felt like they could be safe in Afghanistan.

And so what we saw was that the state of Minnesota, along with all other states across the United States, were just-- did not have the capacity to bring in the volume of refugees that our country wanted to welcome. And so my colleagues at Alight and I, we started showing up at the state resettlement office in Minnesota and basically said, how can we help?

And so that was an opportunity for us to work in partnership with the state of Minnesota, with community-based organizations, with Afghan community leaders, and others, to really be able to set up the new homes for Afghans coming into Minnesota. And so we had the opportunity to do that there. Following the US withdrawal of Afghanistan, there were over 76,000 Afghan nationals who were evacuated to the United States under the program Operation Allies Welcome. And Alight was part of that program, which was something that we were really proud of and really grounded the work that we've been doing for the past three years in the US and with a particular focus in Minnesota.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And one of the things that's so interesting about immigration status is that there are so many different statuses. And people don't know a lot about where people-- why are you here? What's the process? What do you think could be done to perhaps better educate the public about what is going on with the ins and outs of the system and that people are not here illegally if they're a refugee!

JOCELYN WYATT: That's right. There's many different categories of folks that we're talking about. So a refugee is someone who's forced to flee their country due to persecution or conflict. And they cross a border in order to do so. And they're able to apply to live and work permanently in the US.

Asylum seekers are those who apply for protection after arriving in the US or at a port of entry. Both refugees and asylum seekers can work and live legally in the US once they receive work authorization. And then the third category of folks that we work with at Alight are humanitarian parolees. And so these are individuals with temporary protected status, which means that they have permission to live and work legally in the US temporarily with work authorization.

NINA MOINI: And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit to a statement or a letter that you wrote, that you were wanting to just remind folks that you are going to continue to, and A light is going to continue to, as you said, choose optimism. What does that mean to you?

JOCELYN WYATT: So Alight's a 45-year-old organization. We have been working with refugees and displaced people for decades at this point. And our commitment and our mission to serving those that have experienced forcible displacement, those that are refugees, has not changed.

And so we have been able to navigate operating through many administrations throughout our 45-year history. We work in about 20 countries around the world, where we work very closely with governments of all varieties. And so we really feel committed to continuing that work and feel like it's needed more now than ever, given the number of conflicts and climate emergencies that are happening across the world today.

NINA MOINI: And President-elect Trump may reduce refugee admissions again in his second term. And I understand you get about a third of your funding from the federal government. Are you preparing for potential cuts? Or how are you navigating the incoming administration?

JOCELYN WYATT: So we will continue to really pursue partnerships and support with the incoming administration. We have seen that humanitarian aid has been one of the very-- one of the few issues that has really cut across the aisle and has received bipartisan support for decades. And we're really optimistic that that will continue to be true.

Alight is also an organization where we see such an outpouring of generosity and support from the public. And we have seen that also throughout our history. And when the needs are the greatest, we see our supporters step up the most. And so we expect that that will continue over the next several years.

And then we've really worked to partner with corporations as well and with private philanthropy. We get significant funding from United Nations and from other foreign governments that are also donors to the humanitarian causes that Alight works on. And so we expect that that type of support across the board will continue and will certainly require us to continue to innovate, for us to continue to cocreate with our customers, the refugees and displaced people. But we remain committed to serving them over the next four years and certainly beyond.

NINA MOINI: It seems like it takes a variety of people and companies, levels of government, and just community. I've seen a lot of communities step up once some of the short-term assistance for refugees goes away, or when that time runs out. And folks might not know that-- I think there's only five refugee resettlement agencies in the state of Minnesota networking through all of this, cooperating with places like Alight and other leaders. But Minnesota has often been described really as a leader in refugee resettlement. Do you feel that is still the case? And why?

JOCELYN WYATT: Absolutely. We have certainly seen that to be true in Minnesota. As I mentioned earlier, the program Welcome Corps, which was introduced by the State Department two years ago, has been particularly successful in Minnesota. We've seen both through the United for Ukraine program, which started before that, as well as through the programs to welcome in Afghans that I mentioned, the Operation Allies Welcome.

All three of these programs have seen substantial numbers of Minnesotans who have applied to sponsor and support refugee families-- so initially from Afghanistan and from Ukraine, and then more recently from Africa and Latin America as well. And so the State Department, in fact, is looking at Minnesota and saying, wow, what an incredibly welcoming and generous state and just seeing that people across the border are really joining hands with their neighbors, with their faith-based communities, with friends and coworkers and families to be able to welcome in and financially support and provide all the social and emotional and cultural support in order to welcome in new arrivals to the state.

NINA MOINI: Wonderful. Jocelyn, thank you so much for being here. Best of luck with everything in the new year.

JOCELYN WYATT: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

NINA MOINI: Bye-bye. That was Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight, a global organization based partly in Minneapolis.