U.S. Bishops Sue Over Federal Freeze In Refugee Resettlement Funds
The suit marks the latest filed by faith-based groups challenging the Trump administration's hard-line immigration policies.
By Gary Gately
U.S. bishops have sued the Trump administration over its abruptly halting tens of millions of dollars in funding for refugee resettlement, arguing that the move violates federal law and the Constitution and threatens to cut off essential support for thousands of refugees.
In a 35-page lawsuit, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said the “arbitrary and capricious” funding cut-off on January 24 has proved “predictably devastating for USCCB and the refugees it supports.”
The suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the federal government had committed to providing the USCCB $65 million in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2025.
Noting that the bishops, in partnership with the U.S. government, have aided more than 930,000 refugees since 1980, the suit stated: “For decades, the U.S. government has chosen to admit refugees and outsourced its statutory responsibility to provide those refugees with resettlement assistance to non-profit organizations like USCCB.
“But now, after refugees have arrived and been placed in USCCB’s care, the government is attempting to pull the rug out from under USCCB’s programs by halting funding.”
The USCCB and nine other agencies that serve refugees received a letter from the U.S. State Department on January 24 informing them of an immediate suspension of funding pending a review of foreign-aid spending.
The lawsuit said the USCCB is still awaiting about $13 million in unpaid reimbursements for work it completed before the funding suspension “with no indication that any future reimbursements will be paid or that the program will ever resume.” The conference, the suit said, “is accruing millions more each week” in costs, without reimbursement.
The funding freeze has forced the USCCB to send layoff notices to 50 employees of its Migration and Refugee Services office, more than half its staff.
The program’s inability to reimburse Catholic Charities and other partner agencies has required some of them to begin laying off staff and pausing programs, and the funding cut-off threatens support for 6,758 refugees the government had assigned to the USCCB’s care, according to the lawsuit.
Those refugees have been in the country less than 90 days, the period for which they are eligible for resettlement aid under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), created by Congress in 1980.
The USCCB program provides shelter, food, clothing, education and job training to the refugees, all of them vetted and approved by the U.S. government before entering and are in the country legally.
The suit points out that the State Department justified freezing the refugee-resettlement funding by citing President Donald J. Trump’s January 20 executive order suspending foreign aid. But in fact, the USRAP is a domestic program to help newly arrived refugees.
The USCCB’s suit seeks to force the Trump administration to unfreeze funding and reimburse the USCCB for the millions it is owed.
“The conference suddenly finds itself unable to sustain its work to care for the thousands of refugees who were welcomed into our country and assigned to the care of the USCCB by the government after being granted legal status,” Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, the USCCB’s president, said in a statement.
USCCB attorneys argued in the suit that the funding cut-off violates federal laws, including the Refugee Act of 1980, which created the USRAP, and that the Trump administration overstepped its authority under the Constitution’s separation of powers.
“Refugees who have already entered the United States may soon be cut off from support, contravening the statutorily expressed will of Congress and making it more difficult for them to establish themselves as productive members of society,” the USCCB suit said. “The fact that federal funding is integral to USCCB’s resettlement services is a direct result of congressional decisions about the design of the program and the appropriations directed to it.”
The suit names as defendants the State Department and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Both Rubio and Kennedy are Catholics.
Neither department responded to requests for comment Wednesday.
Last month, Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism, criticized the USCCB in a CBS News interview, claiming that financial interests motivated the conference’s efforts to assist ‘illegal immigrants.”
But the USCCB noted in the suit that the conference has consistently spent more than it received from the government for resettlement of refugees in the country legally. In 2023, for example, the USCCB spent $4 million more than the $100 million it received from the government for refugee resettlement, the suit said.
“USCCB spends more on refugee resettlement each year than it receives in funding from the federal government, but it cannot sustain its programs without millions in federal funding that provide the foundation of this private-public partnership,” the lawsuit states.
The suit came a week after Pope Francis sharply rebuked the Trump administration over its mass deportation policy, saying that forcibly removing migrants based solely on their undocumented status unjustly denies them their fundamental dignity and “will end badly.”
In a letter to U.S. bishops, Francis said Trump’s mass deportation plan had triggered a “major crisis” at this “decisive moment in history” and flatly rejected Vance’s attempt to invoke Catholic theology to justify the militarized mass deportations.
The USCCB suit marks the latest filed by faith-based groups challenging the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.
Among them:
Last week, three faith-based organizations that assist refugees filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order suspending the USRAP program and all refugee admissions. “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” the order said.
The suit argued that Trump overstepped his authority and violated federal law in suspending refugee admissions and the USRAP program created by Congress.
Four federal judges have imposed nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order seeking to end “birthright citizenship” for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. On Wednesday, the Trump administration filed a notice that it plans to appeal a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Boston in a suit by 20 Democratic attorneys general challenging the executive order.
The Justice Department also said in a February 6 court filing that it is appealing a Seattle federal judge’s injunction blocking the order.
For more than a century, the federal government and the courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause as a guarantee of “birthright citizenship” to children born in the U.S., with rare exceptions, including children of foreign diplomats.
Last week, 27 Christian and Jewish groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s decision ending a longstanding policy sharply restricting immigration raids on “sensitive locations” such as churches, schools and hospitals. The groups argued that the move violated their religious freedom and hampered their ability to minister to migrants. Quakers filed a separate lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s decision.
Some 580 organizations, including Catholic groups (but not the USCCB), endorsed congressional legislation aimed at preventing immigration authorities from conducting raids at or near such sensitive locations.
Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a Catholic organization that advocates for migrants in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, denounced the change in policy. “It offends basic decency by making parents, children families vulnerable when going to school, to the hospital and to our churches,” Corbett told The Catholic Observer.“The clear intent here is to generate fear in the community and to facilitate the president’s goal of an indiscriminate campaign of deportations,” Corbett added. “The social and economic impacts of increased enforcement will be deep and there will be moral revulsion at any violation of the sacred boundaries of a church, and hopefully this will occasion some critical reflection on the president’s immigration policies.”
Bishop Mark J. Seitz, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, said in a January 23 statement to his flock in his border city of El Paso: “The end of the Department of Homeland Security’s sensitive locations policy strikes fear into the heart of our community, cynically layering a blanket of anxiety on families when they are worshiping God, seeking healthcare and dropping off and picking up children at school….
“We stand with you in this moment of family and personal crisis and pledge to you our solidarity, trusting that the Lord, Jesus Christ, will bring about good even from this moment of pain, and that this time of trial will be just a prelude to real reform, a reconciled society and justice for all those who are forced to migrate.”