NEW YORK – Citing the violation of multiple laws and Congress’s authority to control government spending as outlined by the Constitution, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has sued the Trump administration over its halt of refugee resettlement funding.

“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,” states the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Feb. 18. “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 U.S. bishops now join the long list of states, organizations, and other entities that have sued the Trump administration over various federal funding freezes that have been carried out via executive order. Pertinent to the USCCB lawsuit is the State Department’s decision to suspend funding for refugee resettlement on Jan. 24.

The suspension has forced the USCCB to lay off fifty employees from its Migration & Refugee Services office, more than half of its refugee-resettlement staff. It has also left 6,758 refugees assigned to the USCCB – who were still within their 90-day transition period at the time of the suspension – in limbo as they may soon be cut off from support, according to the lawsuit.

Further, the lawsuit states that the State Department has refused to reimburse the USCCB millions of dollars for work completed prior to Jan. 24 “with no indication that any future reimbursements will be paid or that the program will ever resume.”

The USCCB is currently awaiting approximately $13 million of unpaid reimbursements and currently owes an additional $11.6 million to its subrecipients that it is unable to reimburse, according to the lawsuit, which notes that “these numbers will continue to rise by millions of dollars every week that the Refugee Funding Suspension remains in effect.”

“[The USCCB] faces irreparable damage to its longstanding refugee resettlement programs and its reputation and relationship with its subrecipients and the refugee populations it serves,” the lawsuit states. “USCCB’s inability to reimburse its partner organizations, in turn, has required some of those organizations to lay off staff and may require them to stop providing aid for housing, food, and resettlement to support refugees.”

Specifically, the USCCB sued the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration; the Bureau’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Jennifer Davis, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The lawsuit is the latest escalation in what’s been a consistent war of words on immigration between the U.S. bishops and the Trump administration. In late January, Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, questioned on an edition of CBS’s Sunday news program Face the Nation if the U.S. bishops were worried about humanitarian concerns or their bottom line when referencing the millions they receive from the federal government on an annual basis for their refugee resettlement efforts.

The comment was met with a swift response from the USCCB, defending its work. As Vance suggested, the conference received in excess of $100 million from the federal government as a resettlement contractor in both 2022 and 2023, according to the conference’s published financials. However, records indicate that in each year the conference actually spent more than it received from the federal government on its refugee resettlement efforts, making Vance’s comment a bit of a misnomer.

The lawsuit emphasizes as much.

“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.

For Fiscal Year 2025, which runs from Oct. 1, 2024 to Sept. 30, 2025 the USCCB has two cooperative agreements with the federal government worth around $65 million for initial refugee resettlement, according to the lawsuit.

The USCCB has worked in tandem with the federal government on refugee resettlement since the Refugee Act of 1980 was passed. Today, the USCCB runs the largest non-governmental refugee-resettlement program in the United States, having provided resettlement services to more than 930,000 refugees, the lawsuit notes.

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