Serving immigrant, refugee and marginalized communities during Trump 2.0

For over 30 years, the Arab American Family Support Center has proudly served immigrant, refugee, and marginalized communities across New York. In addition to mental health counseling, AAFSC’s multigenerational programs include family service case management, English language and citizenship classes, young adult and youth leadership development, health insurance and other benefits enrollment, legal services, emergency financial assistance, food and resource distribution, housing navigation, domestic violence case management, and parenting support groups. While AAFSC and the communities it serves are not new to facing threats and discrimination, the present climate presents a confluence of tangible risks to individuals, organizations like theirs, and whole families and communities. 

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Mark Foggin, AAFSC’s interim executive director, about the urgency of the moment. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Your organization has been supporting people from immigrant and refugee communities for three decades. What are you seeing coming into 2025 that is causing concern or strain on your organization’s staff and resources?

I’m sorry to say that, after the election last November, there was a lot that felt very familiar to the communities we serve. And, indeed, there was rhetoric and harmful actions from the first Trump administration, including the so-called Muslim ban. Further back, after 9/11, many in our community were subject to WWII-era-esque “special registration,” based on their countries of origin. Given that painful history, many of my colleagues counseled that we not overreact to 2024’s campaign slogans.

But things are demonstrably different since Jan. 20. In the first days of the administration, we saw attendance at our English and citizenship classes drop by more than half from where it was before the holidays, though it’s stabilized a bit, now down by about a third. Many of the students – most of whom are asylees living in city shelters – have been in touch with our instructors by text and say they are afraid to leave their shelters believing they are safer there from ICE than if they are at or on their way to class.

We have been training our staff how to respond properly to an ICE raid – how to ask to see a valid judicial warrant, how to resist their entry into our facilities if they don’t have proper legal instruments – without getting themselves in trouble, accused of interfering or obstructing. 

Less dramatically, but even more harmful because of the scale, the federal government may cut funding for programs, like SNAP, that our organization and neighborhoods rely upon. And the House of Representatives recently passed a bill that, if it becomes law, will empower the U.S. Treasury Department to unilaterally remove nonprofits’ tax-exempt status without much ability to appeal. So, maybe we stop giving interviews like this that might be construed as critical of the Federal government. Or maybe we are less vociferous in standing up for the rights of persecuted and underserved people in our communities. That’s a chilling abrogation of free speech.

It’s all a lot to contemplate.

What has AAFSC done in the past to address similar conditions and challenges, and how are you building on that experience to meet today’s needs?

While the threats are real, I also remind staff that AAFSC was made for moments like this. Following the 2016 election, AAFSC started our mental health program, quickly developed our program to help young people become civically engaged, and deployed our legal services team more broadly to help with clients’ immigration status. We need the same things today, though, it seems, at a greater scale. We are:

• Protecting our staff and clients: In addition to thinking about how to respond to immigrant enforcement actions, we’ve developed safety plans for each of our facilities.

• Expanding Legal Services: In this climate of instability, our communities deserve clear and accessible information about their rights, as well as support navigating changing laws and regulations. We are conducting regular Know Your Rights trainings and providing individual consultations.  

• Scaling Mental Health Services: We have tripled the size of our clinical program over the past year and now we’re hiring our first dedicated Mental Health Program Director to guide our expansion as our waiting list grows. We’ve also started group therapy sessions as a way to expand services more quickly. 

Tell me more about what you’re seeing on the mental health front. 

Since election day, AAFSC has seen a 20 percent increase – a surge, really – in requests for counseling. That’s not surprising when you think about the stress newcomers are feeling as they absorb the new administration’s hostile anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric. The Arab, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian immigrant communities we serve—who are already disproportionately affected by the psychological toll of migration, displacement, family separation, and poverty – are also walking around wondering on every block if they’ll get stopped by law enforcement. Or they’re holing themselves up inside, physically and socially isolated. Our services are trying to keep them connected to community while also addressing specific mental health conditions.

I’m afraid we anticipate this will only get worse in the months ahead. 

What do organizations like AAFSC need at this point?

I’m sorry this won’t be a more surprising answer, but we need more funding--both to expand programs and to shore up our operations for uncertain times. We assumed we’d have this year to find alternatives for our current federal funding. But based on the Federal Government’s effort to halt all grant spending [this week/last week/last month] we are now racing to find funders who can keep some of our most critical federally-funded programs going this year.  And even the 75 percent of our budget that comes from city and state contracts has some federal dollars woven into those funding streams, putting some of those programs at risk, too.

So we’ve reached out to our foundation partners to increase their support so that AAFSC can scale services proportionate to the heightened demand. We could easily double or triple the size of our mental health program and still have unmet need. Same on our legal services work. That’s because almost no one else is offering counseling or legal support in Arabic, Bangla, Urdu, Wolof, or the other 30 or so languages our staff can speak that aren’t part of most service providers’ repertoire. It’s painful to see how much we could be doing but aren’t able to.

I’d love to ask you a few personal questions too - what is your own professional background and how did you come to serve as Interim ED for AAFSC?

I spent about a dozen years in New York City government, in a variety of roles that were mostly about getting new programs off the ground in public health, emergency management, and economic development. Then I did that as a management consultant where I could also work with the hundreds of nonprofit organizations that are--nowadays--a huge part of the front line of government-funded services. For the past few years, I’ve been an interim executive, helping organizations, like AAFSC, to navigate leadership transitions. I’ve been here for almost 18 months and expect to be here for another nine to 12 months. (The search for their new, long-term CEO just kicked off this month; stay tuned for a position announcement!)

What have been the biggest surprises for you in leading this organization? What are you most proud of the organization accomplishing during the time you have been there?

Less a surprise than a confirmation of just how frequently organizations doing great work, who then grow quickly as funders send resources and ask them to do more, often expand programs more quickly than the infrastructure needed to support them. It makes total sense that, with so much unmet need in the communities groups like AAFSC serve, we want to maximize program dollars instead of, say, building up our finance or operations or fundraising departments. But without the right investments in exactly that sort of organizational infrastructure, it puts the great work we do at risk because it’s not sustainable over the longer haul without that infrastructure. I’m hardly alone, as an ED, in wishing that more funders understood how essential it is to fund the less exciting parts of nonprofits’ operations if they want to see the exciting impacts of our programs continue and deepen -- thinking about it as making the impact of their investments lasting ones.