What happens in Washington does not stay in Washington. Sometimes, the nations and people with the least capacity to manage it are forced to clean up after policy decisions and shifts in the United States.

In El Salvador, Alejandro Calderón reports that the Jesuit-sponsored Fe y Alegría program he administers has been an early victim of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which began in the first days of the Trump administration. While Elon Musk gleefully described feeding U.S.A.I.D. into a wood chipper, Mr. Calderón was learning that in El Salvador, Fe y Alegría was losing virtually all of its U.S. funding.

By the time Mr. Musk’s wood chipper had ceased spinning, Fe y Alegría El Salvador had been forced to close most of its educational and vocational training programs. Before Mr. Musk’s rampage, it served more than 11,000 young people. That number is now below 1,000.

Fe y Alegría is the largest Jesuit education network in the world, with 1,875 institutions that annually serve more than 760,000 students in 22 nations across Latin America, Africa and Europe. American Jesuits International reports that the termination of U.S.A.I.D. has meant the shuttering of Fe y Alegría nutrition, early childhood education and vocation programs in some of the world’s most neglected communities.

Mr. Calderón reports that in 2024, before the cuts to U.S.A.I.D., 8,000 young people graduated from Fe y Alegría’s technical programs, ready for work in El Salvador’s tourism, restaurant and service sectors. If discouraging undocumented immigration is America’s goal, Mr. Calderón wonders why the Trump administration is closing programs that help young people find jobs and begin professions that mean they may never be forced to migrate in search of work.

Many of the young people he works with have extremely limited opportunities to advance their education. Many do not finish or even reach high school, he says. “The important thing for us is to keep giving to the most vulnerable an option to live well.”

White House “policies have human afterlives, and they end up affecting communities; they end up affecting lives,” says Marco Gómez, S.J., the country director of Fe y Alegría in Panama. “These decisions, taken far away, are affecting concrete and real people.”

That impact has been especially clear to him as Fe y Alegría has attempted to address a small piece of the global migration drama in Panama City.

“What we’re seeing is not a crisis of migration alone,” Father Gómez says. “This is deeper. This is a crisis of belonging.”

“No one seems to be paying attention” to the human suffering of the migrants themselves, he worries. But in Panama City, the Jesuits at Fe y Alegría “are promoting human dignity and putting the people in the center,” he says.

“These are our brothers and sisters, and [as Christians] we have the responsibility to take care of them.”

Among the first immigrants affected by the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in February 2025 was a group of about 300 people expelled from the United States to Panama just after President Donald Trump had returned to power. These migrants were victims of “bad timing,” Father Gómez says.

As the Biden administration concluded, they had been rushing through the treacherous Darién Gap to reach Central America and then the U.S.-Mexico border. In the end, as Biden initiatives were shut down, they were not given the chance to make asylum claims when they reached U.S. soil.

Delivering supplies to the Fe y Alegría shelter in Panama City.
A supply run arrives at the shelter in Panama City. Credit: Fe y Alegría

Following the directions of U.S. immigration officials, the group had been ordered onto a plane in San Diego. Most believed they were being moved within the United States to another detention facility where the processing of their asylum claims could begin.

They were stunned to deplane in Panama, a nation many had passed through just weeks or even days before in their struggle to reach the U.S. border. Fe y Alegría was asked to step in to assist many of these deportees.

“We had people from Russia; we had people from China, from Vietnam, from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Iran, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan—15 different nationalities,” Father Gómez remembers.

In normal times, Fe y Alegría focuses primarily on creating opportunities for educational advancement and vocational training, but as the migration crisis accelerated in Panama in recent years, the local Jesuit provincial asked Father Gómez and his team to respond. They had to make a dramatic pivot over the last year, from assisting migrants with food and rest on their way north to the United States to helping people deported from the United States or migrants turned back from Central America or Mexico. Those turned back or deported to Panama confront a precarious legal limbo and a struggle to survive while they figure out their next steps.

Can they find a refuge in other nations now that the United States has ended its asylum and refugee processes? Can they stay where they are and make a future somehow in Panama? Can they safely return to their home nations? That is typically not an option for migrants who have fled China, Iran, Afghanistan and many other countries.

While those questions play out—a process that in normal times would have continued in the United States while individual asylum claims were assessed—Fe y Alegría has provided shelter and sustenance to some of the trapped and abandoned migrants.

“We are just doing humanitarian work as an institution of the church,” Father Gómez says. “We [are] just helping them, responding to the invitation that Pope Francis asked from us. He asked us to welcome the migrants, to protect the migrants and refugees…and finally to integrate them.

“And under no circumstance were we acting ‘politically.’ We were only taking care of them because they had nowhere to go and because it was the right thing to do.”

Based on the stories he has heard, the deported migrants from the infamous San Diego plane had strong claims for asylum protection, according to Father Gómez. Among them were the wives of police and military officers from Afghanistan who had been in flight from the Taliban; a Nigerian woman escaping Boko Haram terror; and a young Iranian man who fled his homeland soon after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in protests that began after a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iranian “morality police” in 2022.

“We never told them to leave,” Father Gómez says. “We told them, ‘You are safe here, and you can stay as long as you want.’”

“And then we never asked them where they went because the government of Panama could accuse us of promoting human trafficking.” That has been an allegation frequently made against Catholic agencies both internationally and within the borders of the United States when they have assisted migrating people during their dangerous, exhausting journeys.

What happened to this group of infamously deported asylum seekers is just a small measure of the tragedy caused by the administration’s deportation and border control policy. Father Gómez struggles to understand how the suffering caused by the abrupt shift on immigration and asylum could be acceptable to average Americans, and he urges American Catholics to reconsider their president’s policies.

“Jesus said, ‘Who are my brothers and my sisters? Those who do the will of God.’”

“He’s not referring to your close circle, your blood relatives only, those who are most proximate to you,” Father Gómez says. “No, he’s talking in an open sense. He’s talking about humanity and how we must take care of each other, and that’s what we see. That is [Fe y Alegría’s] moral and ethical compass.”

The Jesuits in Panama will be monitoring events in the United States because they know they may have to deal with humanitarian trickle-down effects because of them. They are just now keenly attentive to the plight of Haitian immigrants threatened with the loss of temporary protected status. They do not have all that they will need to fully respond to another wave of deportees, but they are preparing to do what they can, Father Gómez says.

“Are we going to just withdraw because we don’t have the resources?” he asks. “No, I think that’s another thing about Jesuit works like Fe y Alegría: Accompaniment is the Jesuit response to this, when systems fail. And the system is failing them—it’s not giving them the chance to apply for asylum, [despite] knowing how difficult their lives are.” 


“So the way the Jesuits work, we stay. Fe y Alegría will stay,” Father Gómez says. “We are in Panama, waiting to see what happens.”

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).