HIAS Greece translator Jalal Barezkai, right, assists a Syrian refugee in an encampment near the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, Greece, May 9, 2018. (Bill Swersey/HIAS)
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — When Mark Hetfield started work on Wednesday morning, he did not know what to tell the staff at HIAS, the Jewish immigration aid and advocacy group where he serves as CEO.
Donald Trump, who reviles much of what the group does and stands for, had just been elected president. Trump’s actions during his first administration had severely curtailed HIAS’ work by dismantling the refugee resettlement program in which HIAS partnered with the federal government.
This election cycle, he ran a campaign denigrating refugees and asylum seekers as an “invasion” and “infestation,” promising to round up and deport millions of them. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened after the gunman railed at HIAS, accusing it of allowing “invaders” into the United States.
In the victory speech he delivered in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, Trump pledged to make good on his campaign talk: “We’re going to have to seal up those borders,” he promised.
The comments cut against everything HIAS stands for. But perhaps ironically, thinking back to Trump’s first term in office eased Hetfield’s mind somewhat: He and the group had been here before. He searched for an email he had written to staff eight years earlier, after Trump’s first win.
“I woke up today speechless and with a feeling of despair in the pit of my stomach. I then dug up the email to staff that I wrote the morning after the 2016 election, and it made me feel a little better,” Hetfield said in the email he ultimately sent Wednesday to staff.
“As Yogi Berra would say, it feels like deja vu all over again,” he said in the email. “We’ve been through this before at HIAS. Together. And we got through it, staying true to our values.”
Still, the prospect of Trump slashing refugee intake from 125,000, where it is now after the Biden administration has rebuilt the resettlement program, to 10,000, which is where it was in Trump’s last year in office, is daunting to Hetfield and his colleagues. Now, once again, the group is one of scores of nonprofits — from LGBTQ organizations to reproductive rights groups — that is confronting the prospect of a Trump administration openly hostile to its mission.
An array of progressive Jewish nonprofits have released statements saying they will be steadfast in the face of the erosions of rights they expect under a Trump presidency. The Jewish Social Justice Roundtable put together a list of 25 such dire statements.
But few subjects animate Trump like immigration, making his return to power simultaneously devastating and energizing to an organization rooted in the promise America held to Jewish refugees at the turn of the 20th century, and to others fleeing oppression more recently. Tuesday’s election signals a drastic change of environment that will impede HIAS’ work but that, like it was eight years ago, could also be a boon for fundraising and awareness.
“We’re concerned that he — and he’s made his intentions clear — that he intends to do that again, which is inconsistent with providing safe and legal pathways to come here,” Hetfield said in an interview. “It gave me some comfort that we’ve done this before, and we survived the first Trump administration and emerged stronger somehow, so we hope that’ll be the case again this time.”
The structures of modern refugee resettlement came about as the Western world coped with the aftermath of the Holocaust, said Melanie Nezer, a former longtime HIAS staffer who is now the vice president of advocacy and external relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
“It’s a program that has historically enjoyed bipartisan support,” she said. “It’s been used to resettle refugees from the former Soviet Union, thousands of refugees from Vietnam, refugees fleeing communism, refugees fleeing authoritarianism. And it was dismantled by the Trump administration.”
Since 2021, the Biden administration has reassembled the program, principally to accommodate refugees from Afghanistan after its fall to the Taliban in 2021 — though it recently limited applications for asylum at the border.
”This has been a partnership and an infrastructure that’s been meticulously, slowly been invested in and built back up,” Nezer said. “It’s something that enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. It’s a legal, safe way to rescue people who are fleeing persecution. And the fear is that it will be dismantled again.”
HIAS is one of approximately 10 organizations that works on refugee resettlement with the government program, called the U.S. Refugees Admissions Program, but it is not wholly reliant on government funding. That’s partly due to programs the group launched or expanded after Trump administration restrictions precluded refugee resettlement.
Days after he first took office in January 2017, Trump signed a wholesale ban on refugee entry, part of his larger travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries. That kicked off four years of adversarial relations between Trump and HIAS, sending its refugee resettlement numbers plummeting and forcing it to look elsewhere to spend its ballooning war chest.
During the four years of Trump’s first term in the White House, HIAS’ revenue increased 77%, from $44 million in 2016 to $78 million in 2020, according to Hetfield. The group sued the Trump administration over the travel ban. Hindered at home, it expanded its activities overseas, and now provides services to refugees in more than 20 countries. “Our U.S. resettlement program receded” under Trump,” he said, “but we became even more active overseas, and had significantly more private support from American Jews.”
And it became a symbol of American Jews’ longstanding support for immigrant rights — especially following the Pittsburgh shooting.
The massacre was fueled by the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which baselessly posits that Jews are orchestrating the mass immigration of people of color to replace whites. Trump echoed the theory at the time — and throughout this year’s campaign — with a claim that Democrats want to migrants to vote and keep Republicans out of power.
The memory of the massacre haunts Hetfield, who testified at the shooter’s trial last year.
“We’ve been worried about another Tree of Life incident since the first one because the hateful rhetoric never went away and replacement theory has become completely mainstream,” he said. “But now we worry even more because dehumanizing speech will be coming from inside the White House.”
In the campaign that delivered him back to the White House, Trump routinely depicted refugees and asylum-seekers as a threat, painting them as overwhelmingly criminal or dangerous. He spoke multiple times about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that, at a rally, he denied had been inspired by Adolf Hitler.
“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world,” he said last month at a rally, referring to his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, Politico reported, “from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
In his sole debate with Harris he amplified the debunked claim that Haitian migrants who have temporary protected status in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets.
Jeff R. Swarz — co-executive director of the Interfaith Council of New Americans Westchester, north of New York City, which has worked with HIAS to resettle 10 refugee families totaling 35 people over the past decade — said that rhetoric is already having an impact.
“The fact that he’s already talking about rounding up and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, it puts a lot of fear into everyone, even legal immigrants,” he said. They may fear arrest, followed by deportation, if they aren’t carrying proper documentation.
The American Immigration Council, an advocacy group that favors immigration reform, estimates that Trump’s deportation plans would cost Americans $1 trillion over a decade, and that it would reduce the gross domestic product somewhat because of shocks to the labor market. (Trump and his primary immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, have said the jobs would go to unemployed American citizens.)
Much of HIAS’s work stateside is done in partnership with local agencies, including Jewish family service agencies across the country. If government funding dries up now, the money HIAS and the local agencies would need to assist refugee families who already are here would come from private donors, Hetfeld said.
“It’s not difficult to find volunteers and to find donors who are happy to support refugee resettlement in their communities,” Hetfield said.
HIAS may be secure in its funding, but that might not spare it from discomfiting government scrutiny, said Andres Spokoiny, president of the Jewish Funders Network.
“I do expect a crackdown on organizations perceived to be hostile to the regime,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy, adding that HIAS would be a likely target. “Whether they’ll get away with it, that I don’t know, but I expect to see the administration try to throw the book at them.”
Prominent Trump supporters have already suggested that in his second term nonprofits opposed to his policies should come under government investigation. And Trump in a 2019 speech to the U.N. General Assembly accused immigration assistance groups of empowering criminals.
“You are empowering criminal organizations that prey on innocent men, women and children,” he said then. “You put your own false sense of virtue before the lives [and] well-being [of] countless innocent people. When you undermine border security, you are undermining human rights and human dignity.”
Nezer said the speech rattled immigrant rights groups, although Trump never followed up with actions against the NGOs. “It was really scary,” she said.
Hetfield also remembers the speech. “We’ve learned to take him seriously and literally, but we didn’t experience that the last time,” he said, referring to undue scrutiny. “We hope we won’t experience it this time.”
Hetfield said the one bright light he’s seen was that, in his victory speech, Trump emphasized that he favored legal immigration. “We want people to come back in, we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally,” said Trump.
Hetfield saw an opening. “It will be HIAS’ job to hold President-elect Trump to his word, to ensure that legal pathways for immigrants and refugees remain open,” he said in his email to staff.
He advised his staff to remain engaged even with those with whom they disagree.
“All of us at HIAS need to be in conversation with the millions of Trump supporters who fear that the United States has lost control of its borders, acknowledge and respect their fears, and assert that legal pathways for immigrants and refugees are key to any effective border enforcement strategy,” he wrote.
And in the email he sent Wednesday, he cadged from his 2016 email some Torah learning. “G-d reminds us 36 times in the Torah, that we need to love the stranger, for we were once strangers ourselves,” he wrote.
“Blaming and fearing the other is easy, as we saw during this campaign,” he said in his email. “Yet those of us who work at HIAS in the United States know that refugees and immigrants have made this country stronger. Many of us owe our very existence to the refuge which this country gave to us, our parents, our grandparents, and our great grandparents.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
