A refugee program launched by the Biden administration faces an uncertain future
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DENVER — Inside a one-bedroom apartment in the heart of Denver in mid-November, Mr. Hedayat Yar was reading books on his living room carpet with his three-year-old daughter and two-year-old son. His wife, Ms. Mohammadi, was preparing a Persian dish of dopiazeh — lamb and onion curry — in the kitchen with a pressure cooker.
The family had only been in the U.S. for seven days, but it was hard to tell. The kitchen windowsill displayed a box of pink synthetic flowers, teas, Cheerios and Turkish soft chews filled the cabinets and the kids were already busy playing with a box full of toys, stuffed animals and English learning books.
The family fled Afghanistan and waited in Pakistan for 2 years, 3 months and 7 days (Hedayat Yar counted) to get to America. The family's new apartment, food, clothes and care — as well as the expediting of their processing to America — are all thanks to a group of 10 Denverites who signed up for a little-known program called the Welcome Corps.
The Welcome Corps — launched in January 2023 by President Biden — allows private citizens to sponsor refugees and pay for them to resettle in America. It’s a return to the nation’s past when, prior to the 1980 Refugee Act, private ethnic and religious organizations came together to welcome in strangers in need from abroad.
“A lot of Americans [beginning in 1980] saw refugee resettlement as something that resettlement agencies did. There were professionals whose job it was to help refugees,” said Julie Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
“With Welcome Corps, we're moving back to where we've been in past periods where Americans are also helping to resettle refugees.”
The Welcome Corps program was established to help Biden achieve his goal of bringing in more refugees, while alleviating the pressures on refugee resettlement organizations and tapping into the goodwill of everyday Americans.
Under President Donald Trump’s first term, refugee resettlement numbers stooped to their lowest levels since the modern U.S. refugee program began in 1980.
“Because President Trump had cut the refugee numbers so much and defunded some of the refugee resettlement organizations, as the refugee program was trying to rebuild [under Biden], drawing on everyday Americans was a way to help expand refugee resettlement back up,” said Gelatt.
The program took months to get off the ground and only this September did it start gaining momentum, helping Biden achieve close to his goal of welcoming in 125,000 refugees by the end of the fiscal year (he reached 100,000, the highest number in three decades of refugee admissions).
The vast majority of refugees came in through traditional refugee resettlement agencies. But the Welcome Corps has added a small boost. Since the Welcome Corp’s inception in January 2023, 2,500 refugees have arrived in the U.S. through that route, including about 90 refugees to Colorado.
However, the future of Welcome Corps is up in the air with the incoming second Trump administration.
On the campaign trail, Trump had pledged to suspend refugee admissions, among other stringent cutbacks to immigration.
“It is a huge concern for us,” said Rebecca Kirzner, associate vice president of strategic communications and media at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish humanitarian aid and resettlement organization.
“Frankly, it’s a devastating prospect to think about knowing that there are tens of thousands of people who are in the pipeline to come to the U.S. who have been extensively vetted and who have been waiting for such a long time,” Kirzner said.
Refugees are defined as those who have been forced to flee their country due to war, violence or persecution, crossed an international border to seek safety and who cannot return to their home country without risking their life or freedoms.
Of the 1,811 refugees who came to the U.S. through the Welcome Corps in fiscal year 2024 (the majority still come in through traditional refugee resettlement agencies), more than 1,400 came in September alone.
“There was a whole lot of thought and design that was put into the program,” said Gelatt. “The limitation is just that it was a bit slow to start.”
For families like Hedayat Yar and Mohammadi (Rocky Mountain PBS is using only their surnames to protect their family that remains in Afghanistan), the program is a lifeline.
Hedayat Yar had been a women’s rights defender and lawyer in Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul, representing women who faced physical, psychological and sexual violence. The organization he worked for had ties to U.S. and international human rights organizations.
When the U.S. withdrew its troops and the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Hedayat Yar became a high-risk target. He received threats over the phone from unknown sources, and members of the Taliban searched and ransacked his home.
“I didn't have the freedom to go outside the house without a male,” said Mohammadi. “Women didn't have the right to get educated or go to work. I just spent all my time at the house like a prison.”
The family was able to obtain travel visas to Pakistan in July 2022 and get on a list to come to the U.S. under “Priority 1” designation.
Since the return of the Taliban in 2021, Afghans have represented one of the largest groups of refugees to America, along with Congolese and Syrians. Afghans have come to the U.S. largely through Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), humanitarian parole, or through Priority 1 or Priority 2 refugee status — but the process is long and arduous.
Hedayat Yar and his family lived in a small apartment in Islamabad, Pakistan and waited to be processed by the U.S. His daughter, then age two, lost her appetite from all of the changes.
It took two years for the family to get their first interview with the International Organization for Migration.
In Seattle, Gayle Zilber, a longtime mentor to Afghan women through the Alliance for International Women’s Rights and a mentor and friend to Hedayat Yar, heard about the Welcome Corps. She asked her sister, Claire, a psychiatrist in Denver if she’d be interested in starting a private sponsor group in the Denver area.
“Nothing was happening [with their application]. There was no office for processing them in Pakistan, which is why I brought them in another way” said Claire Zilber, who formed the private sponsor group along with some of her friends and members of her synagogue, B’nai Havurah.
With the help of her and the Welcome Corps group, the process was expedited — the group filled the application out in December 2023, and nine months later, Hedayat Yar and his family were at the Islamabad Airport on their way to America.
“I felt like a bird, like a bird that left its cage and was flying into the sky,” said Mohammadi of the day she got to the airport in Islamabad to travel to the U.S.
How the Welcome Corps works
Individuals interested in volunteering for the Welcome Corps must create a group of at least five people, raise $2,425 per refugee, create a welcome plan and commit to helping the refugee(s) for at least 90 days (many help well past that date, and create lifelong friendships).
Sponsor groups must do all the tasks that traditional resettlement agencies do: secure initial housing, enroll in benefits such as SNAP and Medicaid, set up doctor’s appointments, sign up for English classes and school for the children, and help find and secure jobs for the refugees.
Each private sponsor group is paired with a private sponsor organization that helps guide and support the group.
The hardest part for Claire Zilber was finding housing. She looked with her son at countless places on Facebook Marketplace, and only secured a place a few days before the family arrived in early November.
“They [landlords] are dealing with a middle-aged white woman, and that's who they think [is renting]. But then during the tour, I would say, ‘Now, I'm co-signing this and I have excellent credit, but this is not for me’. And you could just see people's face change,” Claire Zilber said.
The landlord she eventually signed with for a one-bedroom apartment in the Congress Park neighborhood of Denver is the son and grandson of refugees.
“He had the opposite reaction,” she said. “I almost feel like unofficially he’s now part of our group.”
The apartment is close to a recreation center and swimming pool, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which supported the private sponsor group, offered to pay for the family’s membership.
The apartment also happens to be across the street from Claire Zilber, so she and her husband have invited the family over for meals. Hedayat Yar and Mohammadi have done the same in return.
Danica Larson, a member of the same sponsor group, accompanied Hedayat Yar and his family to a medical clinic recently, where the kids received multiple vaccinations. Afterward, she invited Mohammadi and the two kids to her home for lunch and to pick out vegetables from her garden. Meanwhile, another volunteer took Hedayat Yar to a legal aid organization so he could network while searching for a job in the field.
There are two ways to participate in the Welcome Corps program: through “matching,” in which sponsor groups are matched with refugees who have already been vetted and are in the approved pipeline to come to America, or through “naming,” where a private sponsor group can submit the name of someone they’d like to sponsor.
“When the ‘naming’ program launched last December, it broke the internet,” said Annie Nolte-Henning, executive director of the Community Sponsorship Hub, the implementing partner of the Welcome Corps along with the U.S. State Department.
To date, most volunteers, like Claire Zilber and her group, have been signing up for the “naming” part of the program.
“We have more naming applications because there's a lot of people who have been waiting to sponsor someone they know for decades,” said Nolte-Henning. “And this is the first time in history that they’ve been able to do that.”
Abie Saba Gebre of Aurora has been getting reacquainted with her sister from Eritrea, who she hadn’t seen in 36 years, and her 26-year-old niece, whom she had never met.
Gebre and her close friend created their own private sponsor groups, along with family, friends and members of their church, to sponsor the two women through the “naming” part of the Welcome Corps.
Gebre’s sister left Ethiopia for Eritrea 36 years ago, and Gebre hadn’t seen her until now.
Eritrea’s government is one of the world’s most repressive, subjecting its population to forced labor and conscription and imposing restrictions on freedom of speech. The country has no legislature, no media outlets and a dictator that’s been in power since the country’s independence from Ethiopia in 1993.
Gebre was hesitant to share much about her sister and niece’s situation.
“There are a lot of activists here [in Denver] that support the Eritrean government,” she said. “I hope you understand the fear. They can easily find us.”
Gebre did mention that her sister was placed in prison and tortured after she protested her daughter participating in Eritrea’s mandatory military service. The sister’s husband died during his military service years before, and she didn’t want to also lose her daughter, who was forced to join the military after high school.
Gebre did not speak with her sister for decades, until her sister escaped to Ethiopia four years ago and applied for refugee status in the U.S. Gebre thinks it had something to do with the way the Eritrean government controlled phones and communication lines.
“They’re thanking me every day,” Gebre said. “I said ‘thank God and thank the U.S. government.’”
For now, the family is getting reacquainted with each other. Gebre’s sister and niece are getting used to snow (something they’d never experience in Eritrea), salt (“they say ‘you guys are going to kill us with the salt in food,’” Gebre laughed), and bigger meal proportions.
“They eat very little because maybe they didn’t have much before,” said Gebre. “They say, ‘My God, you guys eat a lot of food.’”
The niece and daughter both got jobs at Denver International Airport and are taking English classes and living in Gebre’s home for now.
“Sometimes when they sit on the table to eat with [me and my husband], I think it's a dream,” Gebre said. “I love my sister.”
Taking it to the finish line
As the last month and a half of the Biden administration wraps up, the Welcome Corps and participating partners are ramping up their recruitment efforts, particularly for volunteers to participate in the “matching” side of the program.
Refugees on the matching side have already been vetted and identified by the U.S. government, so the timeline can move much faster. It can take as little as two months or less to settle them stateside.
On the naming side, however, it can take from six months to several years until the newcomers arrive in the U.S.
In honor of Giving Tuesday December 3, the Welcome Corps offered various incentives to recruit private sponsor groups by that date — and are continuing their push.
All the Welcome Corps experts and partners Rocky Mountain PBS spoke to said it is too soon to know what will happen once Trump takes office and that for now, things are business as usual.
“We don’t know what the next administration will do at this moment,” said Nolte-Henning. “Executive orders can start happening [Trump’s] first day in office.”
But she is hopeful. “We work with Evangelicals, veterans groups, Southern Baptists and all groups of faith” she said, acknowledging that many of them voted for Trump. “This isn’t just a liberal urban service project.”
Nolte-Henning pointed out that the first two refugees that came through the Welcome Corps, in June 2023, were welcomed in red, rural communities in Minnesota: Worthington and Moorehead.
“So we are optimistic that by continuing to engage communities like those and continuing to see them sponsor, it's going to reflect that this is something that the American people want,” she said.
In the meantime, Nolte-Henning said the Community Sponsorship Hub is going to soon start hosting “Know Your Rights” seminars for individuals who have come to the U.S. as refugees — to help dispel myths amid Trump’s rhetoric and plans around mass deportations.
Meredith Levy, the outreach coordinator for the Welcome Corps at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, said it’s not too late to get involved, even with the Trump administration pending.
“I've talked to potential private sponsor group leaders who are just hearing about the program. They say things feel overwhelming and heavy, but understand that there's an opportunity in this moment right now. And I truly believe that this is an option of something that you can do now,” she said.
Hedayat Yar is now looking for a paralegal job at an aid organization so he can continue his legal profession and help people in need, while his wife is hoping to soon work in a preschool or elementary school. Both will begin English classes soon.
Their four-year-old daughter is learning more English and will attend preschool this January. When RMPBS visited her, she said cheerfully on repeat: “Please take a seat,” and “Nice to meet you.”
With each new day, each new walk in Denver’s many parks, and each new moment spent with the ten volunteers, the family of four is slowly stripping away the trauma of their old life and stepping into their new one.
“We deeply appreciate this Welcome Corps group for supporting us and we are really happy to be here,” said Hedayat Yar.