In January, the Trump administration paused visa processing for people from 75 countries. It left many refugees who already live here — mainly from African, Asian and Latin American countries — without a clear path to citizenship.
It also caused a lot of confusion for companies that employ refugees. Since work authorizations were also paused, people didn’t know what was and wasn’t legal. Some companies didn’t know that refugees are allowed to work in the U.S. – even without those documents.
Caitlyn Lewis and Bibi Noor Muhammad work with refugees at Milwaukee's Community Center for Immigrants, where they’ve been helping clients get their jobs back amid the confusion. They spoke with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez about the challenges their clients are facing.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Something that you've taken on is helping people who've lost their job. Can you help me understand and walk me through, from a client's point of view, what the hangup has been for them and what the issues they're bringing to you have been?
Caitlyn Lewis: Well, I think a big part of it is that HR departments don't always know the different documents. They’re like, “I want a work authorization card, I want a green card.” But refugees right now can't get a new work authorization, because they're not approving any applications for them, and they can't get a green card. So, they’re very confused by these complex systems and all the different documents they have, and they don't really know which ones they're supposed to show.
There's normally a language barrier too. They may not even have interpreters on site to guide them through this. So, they might just be getting these warning letters or warning emails in English, which they might not even understand. And then all of a sudden, they're notified that they're suspended, and that's when they kind of come to us frantic, because there’s no good communication in their own language and not enough advocacy on the employer's part to make sure that they understand what's going on.
And, on top of that, refugee resettlement providers would typically be helping with these kinds of issues, but they've lost so much funding that their organizations have had to be cut back. So that's where we partner with them and also with Catholic Charities, because it's really taken a team effort between us service providers.
What has it been like over the past year and a half to advocate for your clients – whether it's for their employers, whether it's other services that they should have? What has it been like as a service provider to keep up with everything that's been changing?
It's been really tough to keep up with everything. And it's actually meant we've had to take less clients and have a waitlist and longer times before people can get in. Before, people were getting their green cards in about six months. In 2024, in one year, we helped almost over 900 people. And then last year, those numbers dropped down to about 800. But this year, we'll be lucky if we hit like 500, because we’ve really had to slow down and keep adjusting our programming to meet the current needs of what's been going on.
It's just creating a larger gap in these legal services, and there are going to be less providers available. Providers are having to do more screening and more advocacy, whereas normally, we’d just be doing affirmative work – helping people get green cards or helping people get citizenship. But now, we're having to think about defensive strategies, because refugees are getting detained in Minnesota. A blind Rohingya man who's a refugee got killed in New York a few weeks ago, and ICE just left him to die on the side of the road. It's so hard to do our jobs and to help the communities and to keep up our previous momentum, because we're constantly having to shift and adjust and protect.
What are you watching for now?
Well, I think the big thing that we're watching is refugee detention, because again, refugees have waited decades to come here on a visa. You know, we hear this famous talking point, “come here the right way.” It's hard to find another immigrant group that has “come here the right way” as refugees have. They've been vetted. They've been interviewed multiple times. They've run background checks on them, and then they finally get resettled here. After a year here, they have a path to a green card, but they have to apply for it again to show that they're living and they're not just going to move to a different country.
And now, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Trump administration are saying, “If they don’t have a green card by that one year date – which is when they're supposed to apply – we can detain them, re-question them and see if they maybe came here fraudulently and they're actually not refugees.”
But thankfully, it looks like the courts are siding against the Trump administration on that. But they detained over 100 refugees in Minneapolis and shipped them off to Texas within less than 24 hours. So, they didn't even have contact with their legal representatives and, on top of that, they took away all their identity documents. So even when they were released from ICE custody, they don’t even have all these very important documents that they only have one copy of and are very difficult to get.
Bibi Noor Muhammad: A lot of my clients are very scared of the fact that they didn't get their green cards. They’re saying, “What am I supposed to do? What if I get arrested? Who am I supposed to contact?” They ask me all these questions, and sometimes we have answers, and sometimes we don't have the answer, and so we don't know how to prevent our clients from getting detained by ICE – even though they came here legally.
_
