Watching a group of 59 South Africans arrive in the United States as refugees on May 12, Francis Kham was left with mixed feelings. That the South Africans—fast-tracked into the United States because of the Trump administration’s contested claims of white genocide—were accepted as refugees is a sign of hope, he says, but it is also the source of great frustration.
“I’m glad that there are people still coming through,” Mr. Kham says, “but this process should be extended to everyone that’s really [facing] the same discrimination.”
“Just because they are white, that doesn’t mean they are the only refugees,” he says. “There are a lot of refugees around the world who are looking for international protection.”
Mr. Kham is a former refugee himself, a member of the Zomi community from Myanmar’s western Chin State. He was admitted to the United States in 2015 and settled in Portland with the assistance of Catholic Charities of Oregon. He is an active member of St. Joseph the Worker parish, a Catholic Charities board member, a social worker and a national leader in the U.S.’s Zomi community.
Unfortunately for Mr. Kham and the Zomi community he seeks to support, it seems unlikely that the Trump administration plans to reverse the blanket stop to refugee resettlement ordered on the night of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The United States was once a reliable destination for refugees from around the world. But during the Trump administration’s first term, refugee resettlement similarly ground to a halt and the vast national charity-based infrastructure that supported it was thoroughly dismantled.
By the end of the Biden presidency, that system had been mostly restored, and in 2024 more than 100,000 refugees were welcomed into the United States—a sharp rebound from the 11,411 refugees admitted in F.Y. 2021. That figure had been the lowest in the history of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program—an unfortunate standard that is likely to be surpassed soon.
The Trump administration has not set a target number for refugee resettlement for F.Y. 2026. Advocates worry that it does not intend to.
The last official target, set by the Biden administration for fiscal year 2025, was 125,000, a figure that is not going to be reached this year. Over the course of F.Y. 2025’s first quarter—October 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024—the United States resettled 27,308 refugees from 62 different countries. But the door slammed shut on Jan. 22 because of the president’s executive order.
Church World Service reports that despite some recent court victories contesting that executive order, the indefinite refugee ban remains in place. “Apart from a small group of Afrikaners, vanishingly few if any refugees are being resettled, and contracts for critical refugee services both domestically and abroad remain suspended,” a status update issued on May 14 from C.W.S. confirms.
At the time of the executive order, more than 20,000 refugees, C.W.S. reports, “had gone through rigorous vetting and screening procedures and were declared ‘Ready for Departure.’ Over 10,000 of these had flights already booked to the U.S. and resettlement agencies (and in many cases family members) waiting to welcome them. All remain stranded.”
Among those stranded refugees are between 5,000 and 10,000 people from the Zomi community, Mr. Kham estimates. Many thousands more remain trapped in dangerous conditions in sometimes unwilling host nations.
Mr. Kham has been struggling mightily to keep some national focus on the plight of Zomi refugees. He worries that the Zomi are not as well known as other refugee groups, even other groups from Myanmar like the Rohingya Muslims, victims of a notorious ethnic cleansing. He worries that this Christian minority will get lost in the shuffle as other communities vie for attention or privileged treatment.
He describes the Zomi, which can be translated as the “Zo people,” as a unique culture in Myanmar’s Chin State. The Zomi are also resident in India, where many have traditionally lived and others have fled to to escape persecution and disorder in Myanmar. The Zomi are almost entirely Christian, with large Catholic and Baptist communities established after 19th- and 20th-century evangelization efforts by U.S. Baptist and French Catholic missionaries.
Natural disasters—including cyclones and a recent earthquake—and man-made catastrophes like Myanmar’s ongoing political chaos and oppression have pressed many Zomi into the difficult decision to flee Myanmar. About 30,000 Zomi refugees escaped to Malaysia and another 10,000 to India. Many also fled to Thailand.
The Covid-19 pandemic badly affected Zomi communities, which received scant assistance from the government in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw. The central government is currently led by a military junta that overthrew the democratically elected leadership of the National League for Democracy in February 2021, beginning yet another round of widespread civil disorder in Myanmar that persists to this day. N.L.P. leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has been imprisoned since the coup.
In an email to America, Hilary Chester, vice president for programs at Jesuit Refugee Service calls the Zomi victims of “true religious persecution.”
“They are a people who were forced off their land, forced into refugee circumstances based on their Christian beliefs.”
“In many respects, they’re not unique,” she writes. “Religious persecution is a common reason people become refugees,” adding, “the types of barriers they have faced are typical, as is the suffering they have experienced in displacement, struggling to gain official recognition as refugees. And, as many refugees do, when provided resettlement opportunities, they thrive.”
Mr. Kham describes the Zomi as a doubly persecuted people—both a religious and ethnic minority. Many also suffer as collateral damage among the various forces warring for control of Chin State.
Mr. Kham reports that while the ethnic militias resist the junta’s military, the Tatmadaw, they also regularly fight among themselves, contributing to the suffering of the Zomi and other communities in Chin State. The International Crisis Group reports that more than 160,000 people, one-third of the population, have been displaced by fighting in Chin State.
In October Mr. Kham’s family home was burned to the ground, as were the homes of scores of his neighbors in Tedim, the largest Zomi city in Chin State. Having fled before the clash began, no one even knows which warring party, one of the Chin rebel factions or the Tatmadaw, is responsible for the destruction. Human Rights Watch has condemned the junta’s “scorched earth” policy in opposition regions and describes Myanmar as a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe
Those who become homeless because of the fighting have no choice but to leave Myanmar, according to Mr. Kham. There are no resources to rebuild and there is little reason to do so because the region remains so insecure. Zomi teenagers, even children as young as 12, also flee to avoid being conscripted into the Tatmadaw and forced to war against their own people.
Because of these conditions and the continuing vulnerability of the Zomi, Mr. Kham implores the U.S. government to reopen the refugee process and urges the Catholic community in the United States to help his people. “We are not a threat to America,” he said. “I would say that we are a blessing to the country as we received the blessing [of the Christian faith] from America.”
He pointed out that the thousands of Zomi, like himself, who have previously come to America as refugees contribute around the United States, building school buses and refrigerators in Oklahoma, serving in the U.S. military and working in meatpacking plants.
Members of the Zomi refugee diaspora can be found around the country. “If you go to a grocery store, and you see a sushi bar, [those workers] might be Zomi people,” Mr. Kham says.
“We work very hard. We pay taxes and we never do harm to any people in the United States.” The Zomi who are not able to come to America, he says, suffer in refugee communities and camps.
According to Ms. Chester, the status of Zomi “in refugee waiting zones like Malaysia is really precarious. They are a minority within a minority as both foreigners and Christians.”
“The biggest problem they face, like most Burmese refugees, is that the countries immediately surrounding them that they can literally walk to are not signatories of the [U.N.] Convention on Refugees,” she adds, “so they are not given status; they cannot lawfully be there. Everywhere they can go is unsafe for them.”
Zomi refugees are treated as illegal immigrants; Zomi children born in Malaysia are essentially stateless, recognized by neither Malaysia nor Myanmar.
The refugees have no legal right to work in Malaysia, Mr. Kham adds, even if they must do so to survive. Their status makes them vulnerable to labor exploitation or arrest. Malaysia has its own version of America’s I.C.E. that his people must evade to escape the horror of deportation back to Myanmar. Their children receive no educational services from the government.
Mr. Kham recently spoke with a friend in Malaysia who said Zomi refugees have been twice injured by sudden changes to U.S. policy—not only has the resettlement process shut down, but because of the abrupt termination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, social services that the refugee community in Malaysia relied on are ending.
“The health care system, the family support, mental health support, and everything, they are about to close very soon,” Mr. Kham says. “All that support came from the U.S. funding.”
Mr. Kham is cheered that this small group of South African farmers has been granted refuge in the United States. “They also have their own struggle there,” he said. But he hopes that other refugee communities may soon be afforded the same opportunity.
The suffering of the South Africans is surely no greater than what the Zomi and other refugee groups have experienced, he says. “Particularly for my community, I would say, war, poverty, discrimination—everything happened the same thing, exactly what [the white South Africans] are facing there.”
Refugee groups “should be treated all equally, so extend resettlement to other communities.”
Zomi refugees, he says, “have no power to do anything,” but they remain hopeful.
“The only thing that we can do is keep praying that in the future the [U.S.] government will rethink what will be best for the community around the world.” He urges American Catholics to do the same.
More from America
- Catholic Relief Services responds to Myanmar earthquake disaster
- An outspoken bishop is bringing hope to Catholics under attack in Myanmar
- The church is ‘under attack’ in Myanmar
- Meet the Catholic sister who is willing to risk her life (again) to stop the violence in Myanmar
A deeper dive
- Zomi Refugee Program
- With “Shock and Awe,” the Second Trump Term Opens with a Bid to Strongly Reshape Immigration
- Zomi USA: How a City in Oklahoma Became Home for an Ethnic Group from Southeast Asia
- Myanmar Refugees in Southeast Asia Struggle After US Aid Cuts
- Daily State of Play: Trump’s Indefinite Refugee Ban and Funding Halt
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
