President Donald Trump’s abrupt elimination of USAID already has caused 400,000 deaths globally and will cause 14 million deaths by 2030, according to the president of the hunger advocacy group Bread for the World.
Eugene Cho joined Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS US, and Stanley Carlson-Thies, senior fellow at the Center for Public Justice, in a panel discussion moderated by Adelle Banks of Religion News Service Oct. 22 in New York City. They spoke at a daylong summit organized by RNS and held at Trinity Commons on Wall Street.
Eugene Cho
“We can now look back and say without any hesitation — despite individuals in the administration saying no one has died as a result of these cuts — we can now say depending on various sources, up to 400,000 people have died as a result of these cuts,” Cho reported. “The Lancet report came out with I think a pretty robust credible research saying that by the year 2030, if nothing were to change from the shutdown of USAID, they’re estimating about 14 million people will lose their lives as a result of these shutdown programs. It also includes approximately 4.7 million children around the world.”
That is just one part of the global catastrophe caused by the Trump administration in its “America First” policies that also have hamstrung faith-groups like Bread for the World and HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian group formerly known as Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Carlson-Thies said. This harms basic relief work and refugee resettlement.
Amid an already complicated relationship between government and faith-based aid agencies, Trump has “brought a tsunami to bear on that whole partnership system,” he said.
Mark Hetfield
Hetfield said the Trump administration has gutted his organization’s work, which relied heavily on pass-through funding. “We have lost at highest half of all our revenue in a day. On Jan. 24, we received stop work orders, orders that literally cut down half of our program with no notice, no consultation. It was a Friday afternoon. We were told effective 5:00 p.m. today, no more work with us and you’ll receive no more pay.”
HIAS US now is involved in a lawsuit over that and over the administration’s changes to refugee resettlement work: “The administration had stopped all refugee resettlement in the United States, on Jan. 20, four days earlier, before the stop work orders. We sued over that as well.”
“We were one of the original faith-based partnerships,” he lamented. Those affected by cessation of refugee resettlement included eight faith-based organizations.
“So we were eight faith-based agencies out of 10 working to settle refugees in the United States in partnership with the State Department. That’s changing right now. The administration has let us know they are moving toward partnership with states and away from partnership with resettlement agencies.”
Eugene Cho, Mark Hetfield and Stanley Carlson-Thies at the RNS syposium. (BNG photo by Mark Wingfield)
In the meantime, the Trump administration has failed to meet every statutory deadline on refugee resettlement goals and plans, he added. “The president is required to consult with Congress, to issue a report to Congress on refugee settlement for the next year and then to issue a presidential determination on how many refugees may come here for the next fiscal year. That all has to be done by Oct. 1. That was not done this year. So we have no answers to any of the questions about what the program will look like next year and they blame the government shut down. But last time I checked, the government was still operating on Sept. 30, so they missed every deadline that had been set in statute for 45 years.”
Second, the administration has radically changed who will be accepted as refugees in America, Hetfield continued.
Previously, the U.S. definition of a “refugee,” he explained, “has mirrored that of the UN definition, which is a person with a well-founded fear of persecution who cannot return to their country of origin because of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion. They must be outside of their country of origin to be a refugee. The Trump administration has found basically a loophole in the Refugee Act to bring in instead white Africans from South Africa and they’re bringing in these Afrikaners who are not displaced from Africa, bringing them in as refugees.”
“There are 128,000 refugees with approval notices from Homeland Security who are much more diverse, who are not being allowed to come in.”
Meanwhile, “there are 128,000 refugees with approval notices from Homeland Security who are much more diverse, who are not being allowed to come in. That has never happened before.”
Third, the Trump administration “has deprioritized religious minorities in the refugee program,” Hetfield said. “We thought religious minorities would be allowed to continue to come in to the United States as refugees.”
But that no longer is the case, negatively affecting Iranian religious minorities of Jews, Christians, Bahais and others from coming to the U.S.to join communities here and find religious freedom. “That program was totally stopped by the Trump administration on Jan. 20, as well as every other refugee program that dealt with giving shelter, giving asylum to people who had claims based on religious persecution,” Hetfield said.
Cho of Bread for the World said it is not just internationals who are being harmed but also poor Americans. The administration has cut SNAP and WIC benefits that help feed hungry Americans.
“Hunger is not a partisan issue,” he declared. “I believe it’s political, but it impacts people of all stripes of all states, urban, rural and what have you. And also the fact that in this country where we boast ourselves as the greatest nation in the world, that there are still 14 million children here in the United States that experience food insecurity, 42 million people on SNAP, 7 million people on WIC … .”
It’s not just the cruelty of cutting of food aid but also the “chaotic cruel nature of how it was conducted,” Cho said, echoing earlier comments by Hetfield that even a year’s notice of impending changes would have allowed time to regroup. But the Trump administration offered no such runway.
The administration has said international aid will be reconstructed in different forms, Cho noted, but said he doesn’t trust that is true.
“Unfortunately, I don’t feel like these conversations are happening at the pace they’ve said it would or in the manner it deserves. … It has been incredibly demoralizing, very challenging to see what has ensued in this past eight or nine months.”
The Trump administration is moving full speed ahead this term with things it could not do in the president’s earlier term, Hetfield said. He was stopped, in part, by data that refuted his assertion refugees are a drain on the U.S. economy. But that information has been discounted and disregarded now.
“In 2017, President Trump … commissioned a study to demonstrate how much refugees cost the American taxpayer. And that study really kind of boomeranged on him because it found that when you look at both sides of the ledger, over a 10-year period, refugees and asylees contribute $63 billion more in state, local and federal taxes than they take in services and assistance.”
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