COLUMBIA — When President Donald Trump won a second term, Saleh Alkhalifa knew his older brother had until January of this year to get from Lebanon to the United States or remain trapped in a country at war.
Alkhalifa’s brother arrived in December 2024, a month before Trump, following promises made on the campaign trail, suspended most refugee admissions in an executive order. Since then, the Trump administration has slashed funding to refugee resettlement groups and paused or eliminated programs meant to help people flee war and persecution to come to the United States.
On Thursday, the administration said it would limit the number of refugees allowed in the country during the coming year at 7,500, a record low.
For nonprofits helping refugees get to South Carolina and settle in once they’re here, those changes mean significant reductions to their budgets and services. Meanwhile, refugees are facing uncertainty about how long they can legally remain in the country and cuts to the benefits that once helped keep them afloat while looking for a job.
Alkhalifa’s family fled to Lebanon from their home country of Syria in 2014. Ten years later, Alkhalifa, his six siblings and his parents settled in Columbia.
The pressure of getting his 28-year-old brother — the last immediate family member overseas — from Lebanon to South Carolina took a toll on the family. But 21-year-old Alkhalifa recognizes how lucky he is to have everyone together and safe.
“That’s something really special,” he said. “We have to remember that it’s something that doesn’t happen twice.”
Pause in resettlement
Many did not have the same luck as Alkhalifa.
Since the beginning of this year, Lutheran Services Carolinas has resettled six people into the country — four from Afghanistan and two from South Africa, said Seth Hershberger, who runs the state’s New Americans Program.
That’s a far cry from the more than 1,300 the nonprofit resettled in South Carolina by this time last year. Lutheran Services expected a new Trump administration to make cuts. Before Trump took office, the nonprofit expected to welcome 500 people into South Carolina in 2025. But that came to a grinding halt in January, Hershberger said.
People the nonprofit worked with “had sold all their belongings, if they had any belongings, and had prepared to move to the U.S., and then all of a sudden were told, ‘No, you can’t come to the U.S.,’” Hershberger said.
The cities and small towns taking in refugees couldn’t handle the number of people moving there from abroad, the Trump administration said in its January executive order pausing refugee resettlement programs.
“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” the order read.
That’s supposed to be the job of organizations like Lutheran Services Carolinas, which works with Global Refuge, one of 10 agencies nationwide approved to identify, screen, process and move refugees from countries where they face persecution into the United States.
Every person the nonprofit works with is coming to the country legally. Many, like the Alkhalifa family, go through years of processing and screening before they can enter the U.S.
Lutheran Services is operating with half the staff and a quarter of the budget it had last year, Hershberger said.
Last year, the nonprofit received about $16 million in federal grants to fund its offices in Greenville, Myrtle Beach and Columbia. This year, it’s getting $4 million to help refugees pay their bills or fund support services for them, Hershberger said.
Reductions in other services
Stopping refugees from coming into the country doesn’t stop the nonprofit’s work, Hershberger said.
For the first few months after a refugee arrives in the country, Lutheran Services Carolina covers their expenses, including rent, utilities, groceries and other necessities. The nonprofit offers cultural orientation and English classes, as well as help finding jobs.
In the past, the nonprofit helped people sign up for public assistance programs, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps. However, that changed with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law July 4, which immediately made refugees ineligible for either program.
Refugees still get help paying for health care during their first four months in the U.S.
After that, they need to either get insurance through a job, pay for it themselves — which is almost impossible — or just go without.
But finding a job that quickly is unrealistic, Hershberger said.
“When you have to focus on just getting a job so fast, it also makes it so that you don’t have as much time for cultural orientation,” he said. “You don’t have as much time for English classes. There’s more pressure on the family in general to all be working and making that a top priority over some of these other things that are necessary for integration in the long term.”
Alkhalifa’s family lost their SNAP benefits, which they used to pay for groceries, under the change in federal law. The family has been getting by, but paying for food and other costs makes saving up for other expenses difficult, Alkhalifa said. His father and one brother are working. But not all of his family speaks fluent English, which makes it more difficult to find a job, he added.
Alkhalifa, who’s looking for one himself, plans to attend Midlands Technical College for two years before transferring to the University of South Carolina to pursue a degree in cybersecurity, he said. First, though, he needs to save at least $4,000 per semester for tuition. He’ll need more if he doesn’t get the aid he applied for, he said.
“It’s kind of a lot of money to pay while having a big family to spend money on,” he said.
Some people who received help from Lutheran Services Carolinas stopped getting assistance at all. In June, the Trump administration received permission from the U.S. Supreme Court to end a humanitarian parole program for people who came to the country from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The nonprofit can’t help refugees from those countries who may have stayed anyway, since it can offer aid only to people in the country with a legal permit, Hershberger said.
Uniting for Ukraine
Also in question is a program offering Ukrainians humanitarian protection amid the country’s ongoing war with Russia. Under the Uniting for Ukraine initiative, U.S. residents could apply to sponsor Ukrainian families into the country and help them get settled.
When reviews for new applications stopped in January, so did the process for Ukrainians who came to the U.S. two years ago and needed to reapply to stay, said Curtis Lee, who founded Carolinas for Ukraine, a nonprofit that has helped resettle 30 Ukrainian refugees in Hartsville. Since then, approvals nationwide have been sporadic, and families with expired or nearly expired parole forms have no clue whether they will be able to stay in the country legally, Lee said.
Without legal residence, the Ukrainians who settled in Hartsville and other parts of the country could lose their jobs or face deportation. But their only other option, in many cases, is to return to a country still at war, Lee said.
“They’re really kind of caught in limbo,” Lee said. “You’re sitting there not knowing if you should be planning on staying or if you should be planning on having to leave, and then you don’t know when you would need to leave.”
“It’s very stressful,” he added.
As of Thursday, just one of those 30 families in Hartsville had received reapproval, Lee said. For the rest of the community, a path forward remained unclear. Without official word as to whether the program is still running, families don’t know if their applications are under consideration or not, he said.
“I think that’s what’s really kind of worn them down, is just not knowing,” Lee said. “They’ve been waiting for months and months and months.”
Looking ahead
Lutheran Services regularly gets calls from clients who are afraid that police might stop and detain them, even though they have legal permission to be in the country, he said. They’re fearful if they see a police car in their neighborhood on a random patrol. Hershberger said he’s getting more calls from people wondering if they should go to work.
Clients learn their legal rights during cultural orientation, but people are still afraid, he said.
“We used to be like, ‘Yes, you should go to work, nothing will happen,’” Hershberger said. “Now we’ve changed our verbiage to more of, ‘Nothing should happen, but we can’t guarantee it, because there’s just a lot of unprecedented things happening, unfortunately.’”
Lutheran Services Carolinas is working to help its clients become self-sufficient so they won’t rely on the nonprofit’s resources. Independence is always the goal, but it became even more important with the uncertainty over the future of resettlement agencies, Hershberger said.
“I think that’s the biggest thing, is we want them to be prepared,” Hershberger said. “If we’re not there to help them, we want them to still be able to live and thrive in the U.S.”
Alkhalifa’s own migration to the U.S. hit one road bump after Trump’s first election in 2016. His parents started the process of coming into the country two years prior, but their application went on pause until Biden took office in 2023, he said.
Since moving to Columbia in February 2024, Alkhalifa has made friends and figured out how to navigate an unfamiliar place. Most important, though, is knowing that he and his family are safe, he said.
“It’s really amazing, having the security, like you belong to somewhere,” he said.
Skylar Laird covers the South Carolina Legislature and criminal justice issues. Originally from Missouri, she previously worked for The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
