How Christian Groups Are Responding to Trump’s Foreign-Aid Freeze

On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 31, World Relief, an evangelical charity that helps resettle refugees around the world, but especially in the U.S., got an order from the U.S. Department of State to stop all work under its contract with the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. This was confusing, since that evening a group of Afghans who had served alongside Americans in the long-running conflict there were arriving into Sacramento airport, and the nonprofit group was contracted by State to take care of them.

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“It said, stop all work,” says Matthew Soerens, the vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief. “But we were not going to not show up at the airport. We were not going to not make sure that they had a place to sleep that night and a warm meal.” It’s not a heavy lift to meet people at an airport and buy them a meal. What worries the folks at World Relief more is who was going to pay their rent for the next 90 days? Usually that time period is covered by federal money distributed through various partners so that refugees have time to get on their feet and find a job, but now the State Department has ordered World Relief and other charities to immediately cease doing that. And who was going to pay rent for the thousands of other families World Relief was supporting, both in the U.S. and overseas?

Since the inauguration, the incoming Administration has imposed spending freezes and stop-work orders on a wide swath of American foreign-aid enterprises. Funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—which, at roughly $40 billion, accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget—was paused for 90 days on all but a very narrow set of programs, mostly involving life-threatening hunger or medical emergencies. Many USAID contractors and staff were fired or put on administrative leave, the USAID website was closed down, and similar cuts were made to the developmental and humanitarian programs of the State Department.

On Feb. 4, a few days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he would run USAID for the time being, the rest of the staff—all except those “responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs”—were also put on leave and those working in overseas missions were told that arrangements would be made for them to return to the U.S. within 30 days.

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Evangelical and other Christian charities have not been spared these cuts. Among the organizations that lost funding are such Christian behemoths as World Vision, International Justice Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, and Catholic Relief Services, which at $476 billion, was the largest USAID recipient in 2024. Because of the vagueness of the language around which programs would still be funded, some groups pulled back their spending, just in case. “World Vision is responding to the executive order that pauses U.S. foreign assistance funding—with the exception of emergency food assistance—for the next 90 days, while programs are reviewed for alignment with the current administration’s foreign policy,” said the international relief organization in a statement to TIME.

But others decided to go ahead anyway. “Although we received suspension orders, we have not halted our work in Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia,” says a spokeswoman for Medical Teams International in an email. “We have chosen this course for the time being because as a Christian organization, we center our decisions on the worth and dignity of ALL people—the people we serve and our staff.” So far only one portion of a program in Uganda has received a waiver to keep operating and the organization recognizes it might not be reimbursed for other programs.

“It is our understanding that life-sustaining essential emergency supplies are exempt from the stop order,” said Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse, in a statement to TIME. “However the details of the waiver process are not yet clear.” He added that his organization, which receives less than 5% of its international aid budget from USAID, would continue to fund the projects, which are in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia.

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Some of the organizations have supporters inside the Trump Administration or the State Department and are trying to use back channels to find some clarity on the future of USAID and the projects it funds. And there are others who are calling on the President to reverse course. “If President Trump understood that evangelical Christians wanted secure borders, he’s absolutely right,” says Soerens. “If he understood that evangelical Christians wanted refugees shut out who had been thoroughly vetted, who in many cases are persecuted Christians, then he got that wrong.”

While 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, Soerens points to a new survey by LifeWay Research, the Southern Baptist Convention’s polling firm, found that 70% of evangelicals in the U.S. say they believe the U.S. has a moral responsibility to receive refugees. This may be why, in the two weeks since the government funds were paused, World Relief has raised $3 million, most of it from small donors. It’s not going to be enough, however, to pay the three months of rent that the government had promised. “There’s about 4,000 people, who the government invited to come to United States, and arranged plane travel for,” he says. “It’s very different from some of the other immigration debates.” The group estimates there will be an $8 million funding hole in their budget if the U.S. government decides to not pay rent for legal refugees.

For Christians who worked with USAID, the stop-work orders, the suspension of funding, and the steady stream of denigration of the agency’s work from Elon Musk, who tweeted that it is “evil,” and Trump adviser Stephen Miller are a profound betrayal of what they consider a sacred vocation. “I’m here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world,” says Anne Linn, who has spent most of her career working on alleviating malaria, both on the ground in different parts of Africa and in Washington, D.C. “Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?” She was laid off on Friday when her contract with the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, like World Relief’s, was canceled.
Linn acknowledges that many Americans would like the malaria-stricken countries to pay for their own health care and not rely so heavily on the U.S. “Those countries want that too,” she says. “But so much of their GDP goes to servicing debt. We have to give them a runway. It can’t just happen overnight.” In the meantime, in some of the countries with which she has worked, the rainy season is about to start; the mosquitos will arrive and the bed nets won’t, because they’re stuck in a warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them also have a stop-work order. She fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. “Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is OK?” she asks. “That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be OK with this.”

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