I have served for the past five and a half years with the Jesuit Refugee Service in the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, the Adjumani refugee settlements in Uganda and the Maban refugee camps in South Sudan. Last year, we received hundreds of refugees in Maban, all fleeing the brutal civil war in Sudan, where over 14 million have been forcibly displaced. 

Truck after truck of refugees came—exhausted from the seven-mile trek from the border, covered with dust, the children too tired even to cry. Yet one little girl whom we helped from the convoy, sitting down on a blanket in the cold, looked up at me and said, “Thank you.” I will never forget her face.

Living abroad, I came to recognize our many blessings as Americans, including the founding belief that each person, wherever they are born, is infinitely precious, endowed with dignity and inalienable rights. No life ever ceases to matter; dignity is never lost. But I have come to wonder whether we still cherish this founding belief. The recent cuts to international aid betray such faith.  There is already suffering, and more deaths among the most vulnerable will follow.

In the Kakuma camp, home to over 300,000 refugees from war-torn neighboring countries, food rations have been reduced to 30 percent of minimal nutritional requirements as a consequence of the cutbacks. Seventy percent of the funding for the World Food Program in Kenya had been provided by the United States; now hundreds of thousands of refugees, a United Nations official says, are “slowly starving” in the Kenyan camps. Malnutrition is likewise surging in the Maban camps, putting the most vulnerable women and children at risk. In Adjumani, too, basic programs in education and health care have been severely curtailed. The story is repeated in camps and settlements throughout the world.

Today, the U.N. Refugee Agency reports that current levels of displacement are among the highest ever recorded. One in every 67 people in the world is now forcibly displaced. By the end of this April, over 122 million people were displaced, 43 million as refugees. Forty percent of the forcibly displaced are children under 18 years. 

U.S. refugee assistance programs have helped millions of displaced families all over the world, reducing maternal and infant mortality, providing life-saving medications, teacher training, and basic primary and secondary education. The costs of such assistance to our nation were miniscule, only 0.0012 percent of U.S. spending per year, according to an analysis by J.R.S. But deep cuts to programs such as Migration and Refugee Assistance and International Disaster Assistance will drastically reduce life-saving efforts. And the Trump administration’s cancellation of nearly $5 billion in foreign aid already approved by Congress imperils not only global health and stability but also trust in the United States to honor its commitments.

J.R.S., like other service agencies, is doing all that is possible to consolidate our programs and sustain our service to the most vulnerable. But donations are critical as we seek to bridge the gaps. Our challenges are immense and growing.

Millions of “the least of our sisters and brothers” will now suffer because of what we fail to do (Mt. 25:40). Yet they have lessons for us. I can testify to the resilience and courage of mothers caring for their children with severe disabilities in Kakuma, Maban and Adjumani. They have lost everything, but not their hope for their children, their belief that each child is infinitely precious. 

As Pope Leo reminded us in his message for the 111th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, on Oct. 4, “In a world darkened by war and injustice…migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope. Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death on the various contemporary migration routes.”

And I recall a young refugee father, Charite Lobo, telling us of his flight from the war-ravaged eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo with his blind daughter: “Father, there is no need to be anxious. You fear because of uncertainties. We, as refugees, experienced these uncertainties from the moment we started running away from our countries…. We do not know the future, but we know that God will care for us. Even when we die; we die with God, who loves and cares for us.

Have we such faith? Our indifference, when we can make a difference, betrays everything we hold most dear. It is not only the humanity of refugees that we are betraying; it is our own.

This article appears in December 2025.

William O’Neill, S.J., is professor emeritus of social ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology and director of immigration ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, both of Santa Clara University. He is currently working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi, Kenya.