Catholic Bishops End Refugee Aid Partnerships With US Government, Citing Funding Cuts

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced Monday that it is ending a half-century of partnerships with the federal government to serve refugees and migrant children, saying the “heartbreaking” decision follows the Trump administration’s abrupt halt to funding.

The break will inevitably result in fewer services than what Catholic agencies were able to offer in the past to people in need, the bishops said.

“As a national effort, we simply cannot sustain the work on our own at current levels or in current form,” Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the conference, said in a statement. “We will work to identify alternative means of support for the people the federal government has already admitted to these programs.”

The decision means the bishops won’t be renewing an existing cluster of agreements with the government to provide various services to refugees and unaccompanied migrant children entering the United States, Broglio said.

The programs will shut down by the end of the fiscal year, which on the federal calendar is the end of September, Broglio added in a Washington Post commentary.

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These programs are in addition to a related program in which the bishops had provided aid to newly arrived refugees, conference spokesperson Chieko Noguchi said. The bishops sued President Donald Trump’s administration in February over its abrupt halt to funding to that program, saying they are owed millions already allocated by Congress to carry out resettlement aid under agreement with the federal government. {snip}

But a federal judge ruled that he couldn’t order the government to pay, saying a contractual dispute belongs before the Court of Federal Claims. {snip}

Beyond that specific funding dispute is the Trump administration’s halt to all new refugee arrivals. The Catholic bishops’ Department of Migration and Refugee Services is one of 10 national agencies, most of them faith-based, which contracted with the federal government to resettle refugees {snip}

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