by Amy Yurkanin

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When Max Rykov started reading a Jan. 24 letter sent to the leaders of the country’s 10 refugee resettlement agencies, he found the wording vague but ominous. The agencies were ordered to “stop all work” funded by the Department of State and “not incur any new costs.”

At first, he wondered if the order from the Trump administration was only targeting refugee work in other countries. Rykov, then the director of development and communications at a refugee resettlement partner in Nashville, began texting colleagues at other agencies. “What does it mean?” he asked.

By Monday, three days after the memo, it became clear. The Nashville International Center for Empowerment, along with similar nonprofits across the country, would not have access to the money the government had promised to refugees for their first three months in the United States. That day, NICE laid off 12 of its 56 resettlement staff members and scrambled to free up funds to pay for the basic needs of nearly 170 people dependent on the frozen grants.

Rykov knew exactly what was at stake, and that delivered an additional dose of dread. Born in the former USSR, he and his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1993, fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic devastation and discrimination against Soviet Jews. He was 4 years old, and it was bewildering. Though his family was part of one of the largest waves of refugee resettlement in U.S. history, they ended up in a place with few Russian immigrants.

Life in Birmingham, Alabama, a post-industrial city shaped by the Civil Rights movement and white flight, revolved around Saturday college football games and Sunday church. Rykov said his family felt “barren” in the U.S. away from their culture. Birmingham’s Jewish community was small and the Russian population tiny.

But a local Jewish organization sponsored the Rykovs and paired them with a “friendship family.” The group rented them an apartment and furnished it. Then the organization helped Rykov’s parents find work. And Birmingham’s Jewish community banded together to fund scholarships for Rykov and other Soviet refugee children to attend a private Jewish school, where Rykov felt less isolated.

He went on to attend the University of Alabama and overcame his feeling of otherness. After graduation, he found purpose in bringing people together through his work organizing cultural events, including arts festivals and an adult spelling bee, doing social media outreach for the Birmingham mayor and, in 2021, finding a dream job at a Nashville nonprofit devoted to the very efforts that he believes helped define him.

When Rykov heard that President Donald Trump’s second administration had ordered cuts to the refugee program, his thoughts raced to the Venezuelan refugee family his organization was assisting, an older woman in poor health, her daughter who cared for her and the daughter’s two children, one not yet kindergarten age. None of them spoke English, and there was no plan for how they would cover the rent, which was due in four days.

“This is a promise that we made to these people that we have reneged on,” he said. “Is that really what’s happening? Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

As the realization of what lay ahead set in, Rykov started to cry.

Over the next two months, the Trump administration carried out and defended its destabilizing cuts to the refugee program. The moves brought wave after wave of uncertainty and chaos to the lives of refugees and those who work to help resettle them.

One of the largest nonprofit agencies that carry out this work, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, laid off a third of its staff in February and said Monday that it would end all of its refugee efforts with the federal government. A Jewish resettlement organization, HIAS,........

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