Just weeks into President Trump’s first term, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network asked the businessman-turned-politician whether he would make the plight of Christians facing religious persecution abroad a priority of his administration.
“Yes,” Trump said. “They’ve been horribly treated.”
The president spoke about Christians fleeing violence in Syria, concluding: “We are going to help them.”
The U.S. State Department has backed up Trump’s statement, recently convening its second ministerial to advance religious freedom, intended to draw attention to the plight of religious minorities all over the world.
But an increasingly vocal band of advocates and experts says the Trump administration’s policies have failed to address many of the challenges faced by Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities abroad — especially those in the Middle East. Some argue the administration’s efforts to scale back refugee resettlement, deport Chaldean Christians living in the United States and potentially end temporary protected status for Syrians have only made their situation worse.
“I can tell you they feel completely abandoned,” Philippe Nassif, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa and former executive director of the advocacy group In Defense of Christians, told Religion News Service. “They feel ignored, and in some cases, they feel used.”
Many critics point to the administration’s decision to reduce the number of refugees allowed into the United States from 110,000 under President Obama to 45,000 shortly after Trump took office. Trump later reduced the cap to 30,000 people — the lowest since the refugee resettlement program started in the 1980s — and White House officials are now reportedly mulling eliminating refugee resettlement altogether.
The reductions have sparked outrage among the nine nonprofit groups that help the government resettle refugees, six of which are faith-based.
Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for the evangelical Christian organization World Relief, has tracked refugees coming into the U.S. and found that Christian refugee admissions have fallen as well.
“The numbers don’t lie,” said Soerens, whose group is among those that resettle refugees.
The number of Christian refugees entering the U.S. dropped from 37,521 in fiscal 2016 to 22,747 projected for the end of fiscal 2019 — a 39 per cent decrease, according to Soerens’ calculations using data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.
