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Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Is Fulfilling Kissinger's Dream
Behind closed doors, the late Henry Kissinger left no doubt about how little he valued human rights. Exhibit A is the conversation he had with his boss, President Richard Nixon, on March 1, 1973, which was caught, like so much else, on Nixon's Oval Office recording device. The two have just said goodbye to Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, and they are casually discussing a matter that came up during her White House visit: whether the administration should do anything to help Soviet Jews, a population persecuted in their country but also denied the possibility of leaving it. 'The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,' Secretary of State Kissinger asserts. 'And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.' Maybe. Coming from a Jewish man who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in the United States, this is some ice-cold stuff. But it is also classic Kissinger, the purest distillation of the chessboard logic of his realpolitik diplomatic philosophy: When it comes to dealing with other countries, pragmatism must prevail; there is no room for morality, for America's 'missionary vigor,' as he scornfully called it in his book Diplomacy. Perhaps no other American statesman has ever disdained the role of idealism in foreign policy—the meddling of human-rights activists and democracy crusaders—quite like Kissinger. Until now, that is. In just the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term, not only has the president sidestepped those annoying do-gooders Kissinger had to contend with, but he has pretty definitively blown them away with a few robust huffs and puffs. And the change, which Kissinger could have only dreamed about, is bewildering to consider. By defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development and rooting out offices dealing with human rights and democracy at the State Department, Trump decimated, almost overnight, a whole government sector focused on defending fundamental (and, it once seemed, deeply American) principles. Freedom House, established in 1941, one of the oldest human-rights organizations in the world, will now end 80 percent of its programming. Government-funded groups such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which monitor elections overseas and support anti-corruption efforts, have faced the chain saws of DOGE—both have had to furlough two-thirds of their staff and are closing offices all over the world. A third group, the National Endowment for Democracy, is in a fight for its life to get its funding restored by an act of Congress. [Adrienne LaFrance: A ticking clock on American freedom] Then there was the executive order killing the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, and broadcasts into countries including Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. Their radio waves were transmitted to 420 million people in more than 100 countries each week. No more. The Trump administration even did away with the Wilson Center, a foreign-policy think tank whose thinking may have been too closely associated with its namesake, Woodrow Wilson, a president known for championing 'moral diplomacy.' Would Kissinger be pleased? He certainly had negative feelings about human rights, but that was because they were a bothersome obstacle to an overriding goal: world stability and the avoidance of nuclear war. To give his own ethical vision its due, he thought that, by maintaining a balance of power among major states based on intersecting webs of self-interest, he might keep at bay the forces of geopolitical chaos and unpredictability. If a few Soviet Jews had to go to the gas chambers as collateral damage, that was, he seemed to be saying, a price worth paying for the greater good of avoiding a showdown with the Soviet Union that could blow up the world. Though this represented transactionalism toward a greater purpose—morally corrupting though it may have been—what we are seeing now is transactionalism all the way down. Trump seems to want to sweep aside moral concerns not because they preclude the new world order he envisions, but because he believes they are inherently worthless—or, as his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, put it, the fruits of a 'radical political ideology.' This is not to say that past presidents were necessarily more idealistic at their core (though Jimmy Carter probably was). They found ways to use human rights and democracy promotion as rhetorical weapons for achieving their own global aims—such as Ronald Reagan's attack on communism as a godless and immoral system, and George W. Bush's framing of the Iraq War as part of a grand strategy to bring democracy to the Middle East. Trump has no use for these ideas. The world is dog-eat-dog, and the United States needs to assert itself as the biggest dog. End of story. I asked Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, to imagine these past 100 days from Kissinger's perspective. 'He would have been happy to see an emphasis on power over ideals,' Suri said. 'He long criticized the United States for having this Wilsonian obsession and placing the soft elements, the idealistic elements, ahead of the power elements.' And Kissinger would have appreciated Trump's emphasis on powerful nations and contempt for international bodies, such as the European Union and the United Nations, which the statesman considered 'a nuisance at best,' Suri said. [Stephen Sestanovich: The humbling of Henry Kissinger] Kissinger had his own Trumpy moments of impetuous bullying, in which he exercised American power without much thought to its consequences. The covert intervention in Chile is perhaps the best example. When the socialist Salvador Allende won the country's election in 1970, Kissinger feared the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, but rather than creating a counterbalance, he decided to try to immediately stomp out the threat. 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,' he reportedly said. (It's not so hard to imagine Trump saying a similar thing after Canada's recent parliamentary election, in which the winning Liberal party won roughly 44 percent of the vote.) The military coup that Kissinger helped foment in Chile, which ushered in the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, only further destabilized the region (and undermined his larger goal of global stability). Where his approach was more effective—more enduring and less Trumpy—was in bringing about 'systemic shifts' in world power, as Suri put it: détente with the Soviet Union (those Jews be damned); the diplomatic opening to China (tens of millions of Mao's victims be damned). Morality was not a factor here either, but at least these moves were based on a strategy of arriving at more security and calm. Whether this was a worthy trade-off is the question that Kissinger's legacy leaves us with. What he would never have anticipated is a world in which the 'missionary' strain in American foreign policy would cease to be a factor at all. The idealists were foils for Kissinger, even when they called him a 'war criminal,' as Christopher Hitchens did. But Kissinger knew they existed as a countervailing force, one as old as the country itself. What does it mean that this might no longer be the case, that an even colder, crueler, more self-interested version of realpolitik is upon us? An NPR story on the new changes at the State Department contained a particularly chilling detail: According to a memo, employees were asked to 'streamline' the annual human-rights reports issued by the department, so that they might align with 'recently issued Executive Orders.' In practice, the memo explained, the reports should be scrubbed of references such as those to prison abuses, government corruption, and locking up dissidents without due process. They should now contain only the minimum that was legally mandated by Congress. In the report on El Salvador, whose penal system has become a dumping ground for migrants deported from the United States, there will be no details on the conditions in those prisons. Regarding Hungary, where Trump has a strongman ally in Viktor Orbán, the section titled 'Corruption in Government' is to be struck, the memo shows. [Read: Looks like Mussolini, quacks like Mussolini] Even when America neglected its ideals, or just paid lip service to them, or had leaders like Kissinger who actively circumvented them, the country still presented itself as a record keeper of last resort when it came to abuses carried out by the forces of despotism. If you were a dissident or a persecuted minority, there was solace in knowing that, somewhere in the government of the most powerful country in the world, someone was working on a report that might bear witness to widespread discrimination or killing. America offered the chance to at least be heard—a hotline with some assurance of a sympathetic ear at the other end. But Trump is now going further than Kissinger himself might have wanted. He is disconnecting that line. There is no longer anyone left to pick up the phone. *Illustration Sources: White House / CNP / Getty; Tom Chalky / Digital Vintage Library; Alex Wroblewski / Tetiana Dzhafarova / AFP / Getty; Getty Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump Is Fulfilling Kissinger's Dream
Behind closed doors, the late Henry Kissinger left no doubt about how little he valued human rights. Exhibit A is the conversation he had with his boss, President Richard Nixon, on March 1, 1973, which was caught, like so much else, on Nixon's Oval Office recording device. The two have just said goodbye to Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, and they are casually discussing a matter that came up during her White House visit: whether the administration should do anything to help Soviet Jews, a population persecuted in their country but also denied the possibility of leaving it. 'The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,' Secretary of State Kissinger asserts. 'And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.' Maybe. Coming from a Jewish man who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in the United States, this is some ice-cold stuff. But it is also classic Kissinger, the purest distillation of the chessboard logic of his realpolitik diplomatic philosophy: When it comes to dealing with other countries, pragmatism must prevail; there is no room for morality, for America's 'missionary vigor,' as he scornfully called it in his book Diplomacy. Perhaps no other American statesman has ever disdained the role of idealism in foreign policy—the meddling of human-rights activists and democracy crusaders—quite like Kissinger. Until now, that is. In just the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term, not only has the president sidestepped those annoying do-gooders Kissinger had to contend with, but he has pretty definitively blown them away with a few robust huffs and puffs. And the change, which Kissinger could have only dreamed about, is bewildering to consider. By defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development and rooting out offices dealing with human rights and democracy at the State Department, Trump decimated, almost overnight, a whole government sector focused on defending fundamental (and, it once seemed, deeply American) principles. Freedom House, established in 1941, one of the oldest human-rights organizations in the world, will now end 80 percent of its programming. Government-funded groups such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which monitor elections overseas and support anti-corruption efforts, have faced the chain saws of DOGE—both have had to furlough two-thirds of their staff and are closing offices all over the world. A third group, the National Endowment for Democracy, is in a fight for its life to get its funding restored by an act of Congress. Adrienne LaFrance: A ticking clock on American freedom Then there was the executive order killing the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, and broadcasts into countries including Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. Their radio waves were transmitted to 420 million people in more than 100 countries each week. No more. The Trump administration even did away with the Wilson Center, a foreign-policy think tank whose thinking may have been too closely associated with its namesake, Woodrow Wilson, a president known for championing 'moral diplomacy.' Would Kissinger be pleased? He certainly had negative feelings about human rights, but that was because they were a bothersome obstacle to an overriding goal: world stability and the avoidance of nuclear war. To give his own ethical vision its due, he thought that, by maintaining a balance of power among major states based on intersecting webs of self-interest, he might keep at bay the forces of geopolitical chaos and unpredictability. If a few Soviet Jews had to go to the gas chambers as collateral damage, that was, he seemed to be saying, a price worth paying for the greater good of avoiding a showdown with the Soviet Union that could blow up the world. Though this represented transactionalism toward a greater purpose—morally corrupting though it may have been—what we are seeing now is transactionalism all the way down. Trump seems to want to sweep aside moral concerns not because they preclude the new world order he envisions, but because he believes they are inherently worthless—or, as his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, put it, the fruits of a 'radical political ideology.' This is not to say that past presidents were necessarily more idealistic at their core (though Jimmy Carter probably was). They found ways to use human rights and democracy promotion as rhetorical weapons for achieving their own global aims—such as Ronald Reagan's attack on communism as a godless and immoral system, and George W. Bush's framing of the Iraq War as part of a grand strategy to bring democracy to the Middle East. Trump has no use for these ideas. The world is dog-eat-dog, and the United States needs to assert itself as the biggest dog. End of story. I asked Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, to imagine these past 100 days from Kissinger's perspective. 'He would have been happy to see an emphasis on power over ideals,' Suri said. 'He long criticized the United States for having this Wilsonian obsession and placing the soft elements, the idealistic elements, ahead of the power elements.' And Kissinger would have appreciated Trump's emphasis on powerful nations and contempt for international bodies, such as the European Union and the United Nations, which the statesman considered 'a nuisance at best,' Suri said. Stephen Sestanovich: The humbling of Henry Kissinger Kissinger had his own Trumpy moments of impetuous bullying, in which he exercised American power without much thought to its consequences. The covert intervention in Chile is perhaps the best example. When the socialist Salvador Allende won the country's election in 1970, Kissinger feared the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, but rather than creating a counterbalance, he decided to try to immediately stomp out the threat. 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,' he reportedly said. (It's not so hard to imagine Trump saying a similar thing after Canada's recent parliamentary election, in which the winning Liberal party won roughly 44 percent of the vote.) The military coup that Kissinger helped foment in Chile, which ushered in the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, only further destabilized the region (and undermined his larger goal of global stability). Where his approach was more effective—more enduring and less Trumpy—was in bringing about 'systemic shifts' in world power, as Suri put it: détente with the Soviet Union (those Jews be damned); the diplomatic opening to China (tens of millions of Mao's victims be damned). Morality was not a factor here either, but at least these moves were based on a strategy of arriving at more security and calm. Whether this was a worthy trade-off is the question that Kissinger's legacy leaves us with. What he would never have anticipated is a world in which the 'missionary' strain in American foreign policy would cease to be a factor at all. The idealists were foils for Kissinger, even when they called him a 'war criminal,' as Christopher Hitchens did. But Kissinger knew they existed as a countervailing force, one as old as the country itself. What does it mean that this might no longer be the case, that an even colder, crueler, more self-interested version of realpolitik is upon us? An NPR story on the new changes at the State Department contained a particularly chilling detail: According to a memo, employees were asked to 'streamline' the annual human-rights reports issued by the department, so that they might align with 'recently issued Executive Orders.' In practice, the memo explained, the reports should be scrubbed of references such as those to prison abuses, government corruption, and locking up dissidents without due process. They should now contain only the minimum that was legally mandated by Congress. In the report on El Salvador, whose penal system has become a dumping ground for migrants deported from the United States, there will be no details on the conditions in those prisons. Regarding Hungary, where Trump has a strongman ally in Viktor Orbán, the section titled 'Corruption in Government' is to be struck, the memo shows. Even when America neglected its ideals, or just paid lip service to them, or had leaders like Kissinger who actively circumvented them, the country still presented itself as a record keeper of last resort when it came to abuses carried out by the forces of despotism. If you were a dissident or a persecuted minority, there was solace in knowing that, somewhere in the government of the most powerful country in the world, someone was working on a report that might bear witness to widespread discrimination or killing. America offered the chance to at least be heard—a hotline with some assurance of a sympathetic ear at the other end. But Trump is now going further than Kissinger himself might have wanted. He is disconnecting that line. There is no longer anyone left to pick up the phone.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Two months after Trump's funding cuts, a nonprofit struggles to support refugees and itself
Bulonza Chishamara (standing) and Muganga Akilimali (center) left the Democratic Republic of Congo 10 years ago. The family was approved for refugee resettlement in Tennessee last year. Credit: Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Broken Promises: A Trump administration freeze of funds designated to help new refugees is causing chaos for families and forcing nonprofits to cut promised services. Frustrated Families: Immigrants receiving less help from caseworkers are struggling to find work and navigate health care systems. Overwhelmed Volunteers: Church members and other volunteers are filling some gaps, but they don't have the same resources as the aid agencies that used to do this work. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. Were they helpful? 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, cut 40% of its staff. As the groups fight legal battles to recoup the millions of dollars the government owes them, some have been forced to close resettlement offices entirely. The Nashville International Center for Empowerment is still struggling to keep its own afloat. Although NICE staff members had anticipated some cuts to refugee programs under Trump, they said they were caught off guard when reimbursements for money already spent failed to appear and by the dwindling opportunities to seek recourse. After a judge ordered the Trump administration to restart refugee admissions, the administration responded by canceling contracts with existing resettlement agencies and announcing plans to find new partners. And the administration has indicated it will remain resistant, refusing to spend millions appropriated by Congress for refugees. 'Many have lost faith and trust in the American system because of this,' said Wooksoo Kim, director of the Immigrant and Refugee Research Institute at the University of Buffalo. 'For many refugees, it may start to feel like it's no different from where they came from.' In court documents, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued the U.S. does not have the capacity to support large numbers of refugees. 'The President lawfully exercised his authority to suspend the admission of refugees pending a determination that 'further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States,'' the motion said. In Nashville, that anxiety has been playing out week after week in tear-filled offices and in apartment complexes teeming with families who fled war and oppression. Rykov couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by the extreme shift in attitudes about immigrants in just a few years. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, his family's dormant fears about Russia were reawakened — but they felt a surge of pride for the U.S. when it stepped up to help Ukraine and welcome its refugees. Months after the invasion, Ukrainian athletes came to Birmingham for the World Games, which is similar to the Olympics. When they entered the stadium waving the Ukrainian flag, the crowd gave them a standing ovation. His parents, who'd never felt quite at home in the U.S., loudly joined in the 'U-S-A' chant that followed. But now, three years later, was all of America now ready to abandon refugees? Rykov was starting to see the signs, but he refused to believe it and instead recommitted himself to the work. He and his colleagues reached out to every donor in their network and called an online meeting with local churches who might be able to help with rent payments, food, job searches and transportation. Agencies would struggle without the help of the churches. And churches don't have the resources, training or bandwidth to carry out the work of the agencies. But Rykov knew that for the time being, he'd need more help than ever from church volunteers. 'Without your intervention here, this is gonna be a humanitarian disaster in Nashville,' he told them in the online meeting held about a week after the cuts. 'And in every community, obviously, but we were focusing on ours. We're not gonna be in a position to help in the same way much longer, and this is a stark reality that we're facing.' Then he went on the local news, warning that 'this immediate funding freeze puts those recently arrived refugees really at risk of homelessness.' The responses on social media reflected the hate and intolerance that had polluted the national conversation about immigration. 'The common theme was, 'Refugees? Do you mean 'illegal invaders'?'' Rykov recalled. 'People are so completely misinformed, clearly not reading the article or watching the story, and it's very disappointing to see that. And I guess it's sad too that I expect it.' In late February, church volunteer Abdul Makembe and a program manager from NICE squeezed into the cramped apartment of a family of five from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both Makembe and NICE had been working with the family for months, but with the loss of funding, NICE could no longer offer support and had asked Makembe to be more involved. A native of Tanzania, Makembe moved to Tennessee in the late 1970s. After working in infectious disease research and nonprofit management, which involved several trips to Africa, he retired in 2015 and began volunteering to help newly arrived African families. Rykov came to know him as a fixture of the refugee community, always eager to help. In the apartment, Makembe perched on the edge of a couch and Mungaga Akilimali sat across from him on the floor. 'So, the situation has improved a little bit?' Makembe asked. The Congolese man ran his hands over his head. 'The situation, so far, not yet,' Akilimali said. 'I'm just trying to apply and reapply and reapply, but so far nothing.' Akilimali and his family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo more than 10 years ago. Since 1996, soldiers and militias have killed 6 million people there and committed atrocities against countless civilians. War, political instability and widespread poverty have displaced millions of others. Akilimali and his wife settled for a time in South Africa, where they encountered xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence. Immigrants and refugees have become political scapegoats there, spawning a rash of attacks and even murders. His wife, Bulonza Chishamara, nearly died there in 2018 after an ambush by an anti-immigrant mob. Doctors gave her eight units of blood and Chishamara spent days paralyzed in a hospital bed, Akilimali said. She still walks with a limp. The family had rejoiced when they got approved for refugee resettlement in 2024 in Tennessee. Their new life in Nashville began with promise. Akilimali, who speaks fluent English and trained as a mechanic, got a driver's license and a job at Nissan. However, he lost the job before his probationary period ended due to layoffs, and he hasn't been able to find another one. NICE used to have a robust staff of employment specialists. But the cuts forced the organization to reassign them. That left fewer resources for people like Akilimali, who had been in the U.S. longer than the three months during which new refugees were eligible for state department aid but who still needed help finding work. For Rykov, the work of spreading awareness about the cuts and raising funds to offset them intensified throughout February. He and others working with refugees across the country were hoping that the courts might force the administration to release the federal money — that if they could keep things afloat in the short term, relief would come. Then, on Feb. 25, a federal judge in Washington ruled in favor of the agencies. He ordered the administration to restore payments and restart refugee admissions. The relief was short-lived. A day later, the administration canceled contracts with resettlement agencies, and lawyers for the administration have appealed the order. Their argument: The gutted refugee agencies no longer have capacity to restart resettlement, making it impossible to comply with court orders. Rykov said some of the diminished number of remaining staff members began to look for new jobs. After that, Rykov and his team kicked into emergency mode. They worked long hours making phone calls and arranging meetings with potential volunteers and donors. 'It was a cocktail of emotions,' he said. The generosity of donors and volunteers filled him with gratitude. But he couldn't escape the sense of foreboding that consumed the office, where many desks sat empty and remaining employees voiced deepening concerns about the fates of their clients. Rykov likened the urgent energy at NICE to the aftermath of a natural disaster. 'There's no time to screw around.' At the same time, staffers worried about the cratering budget and the future of the organization. And it was hard not to notice how much the mood in Tennessee and around the country was shifting. In an order suspending refugee admissions, Trump described immigrants as a 'burden' who have 'inundated' American towns and had always felt protected, powered by an idealistic and diverse staff who chose to work in refugee resettlement despite the long hours and low pay. The cuts and the discourse eroded that sense of safety, Rykov said. In February, a tech company offered him a job in Birmingham. It was a chance to be closer to his parents and back in the city where he'd come of age — a reminder of an era that felt kinder than the current one. He took the job. 'Working at NICE, it's the best job I ever had and the most meaningful job I ever had,' he said. Rykov packed up a few things from NICE. A Ukrainian flag lapel pin. A signed photograph of him and his coworkers. In his Birmingham apartment, he placed the picture on a bookshelf next to one of him and his parents at his high school graduation. By the time he left, NICE's refugee resettlement team was down to 30 employees; it had been 56 before the cuts. For its part, NICE has vowed to carry on. The organization has paired 24 families with volunteer mentors since the funding cuts. Church volunteers, who were accustomed to helping furnish and decorate apartments for new arrivals, now had to help prevent evictions. They had to track down documents and help complete paperwork lost in the confusion of the nonprofit's layoffs. And the group of mostly retired professionals now had to assist with the daunting task of finding unskilled jobs for refugees who didn't speak much English. On a mid-March morning, Makembe woke at 6 a.m. to begin tackling his volunteer work for NICE. Despite the long hours he clocks volunteering, the 74-year-old has kept his energy level and his spirits up. As he left the garage apartment he shares with his wife in a rough north Nashville neighborhood, he made sure to double-check the locks. On this day, he was working not with the Akilimali family but with a family of four who recently arrived from Africa. The child needs to see a specialist at the Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. It was Vanderbilt that brought Makembe to Nashville decades ago, for his master's degree in economic planning. He followed that with a doctorate in health policy and research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the years that followed, he made repeated trips back to Tanzania to do research on malaria and parasitic infections. All that took a toll on Makembe's marriage, and he and his first wife divorced when his two children were very young. They are now grown and successful. His son is an accountant and his daughter recently finished law school and works at a firm in New York. That leaves him more time to spend with refugees. But the volunteer work does bring some financial stress. He is trying to save $5,000 to apply for a green card for his wife, which is tough. Because he spent much of his career working outside the U.S., Makembe receives less than $1,000 a month from Social Security. He drives a 2004 Toyota that was donated to his church to aid the congregation's work with refugees, but he pays out of pocket for gas and car insurance. The costs can add up. It's not uncommon for him to burn a quarter tank of gas a day when he is volunteering. Makembe's church, Woodmont Hills Church, is a significant contributor to the city's refugee resettlement work — an ethos shared by its current congregants but that has led to the loss of members over the years. Though it had a congregation nearing 3,000 members in the late '90s, attendance shrank as the church's ideology grew more progressive and Tennessee's grew more conservative. It's now down to 800 members. Yet the church remained steadfast in its commitment to helping refugees. Its leaders invited NICE to hold classes in its empty meeting rooms and made space to house a Swahili church and a Baptist church formed by refugees from Myanmar. And when NICE lost funding, Woodmont Hills members donated their time and money. Makembe has helped dozens of refugees over the years but was particularly worried for the family he had to take to the Children's Hospital that March morning, serving as both driver and translator. They arrived right before Trump cut off funding, and they had struggled to get medical care for their 5-year-old's persistent seizures. A doctor at a local clinic had prescribed antiseizure medication, but it didn't work, and the child experienced episodes where his muscles tensed and froze for minutes at a time. Nashville has world-class medical facilities, but NICE no longer had staff available to help the family understand and navigate that care, leaving them frustrated. It took months for the family to get in to see a specialist. During the long wait, Makembe said, the boy's father began to lose hope. His son's seizures had become longer and more frequent. Makembe stepped in to help them get a referral from a doctor at the local clinic. The child's father had to miss the doctor's appointment that March morning so that he could go to an interview at a company that packages computer parts. Both he and his wife had been searching for jobs and striking out. Makembe has tried to help but has run into barriers. He does not have the same connections with labor agencies that NICE staffers did. Makembe said he wants to get the child enrolled in a special school for the fall and find a wheelchair so his mom won't have to carry him. And that's just this family. Makembe said new refugees have been waiting for months to get job interviews. When he visits the five families he mentors, their neighbors approach him asking for help. Many of their requests are for the assistance NICE and other refugee agencies once offered. 'I'm very much worried,' he said. 'I mean, they have no idea of what to do.'
