Chaos and Crisis as Pink Slips by the Thousands (!) Hit the UN Refugee Agency and International Organization for Migration

Trump's foreign aid freeze is causing chaos

UNHCR Doing What It Does in South Sudan. Birungi Machrine/UMISS

The UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration are two entities now squarely in the crosshairs of their once-strongest backer. Both agencies rely heavily on American funding—but with that funding now mostly cut, they’re laying off staff by the thousands.

In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, Anjali and Mark discuss the impact of these cuts on the agencies themselves, as well as the broader question: What does it mean to live in a world where the two global agencies most responsible for supporting refugees and displaced people can no longer operate anywhere near full capacity?

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Anjali and Mark also examine massive cuts hitting a lesser-known entity: the UN Department of Safety and Security. This is the UN’s risk management arm, which typically works behind the scenes to ensure the rest of the UN can carry out its work safely. It’s a crucial part of the UN ecosystem—and it’s being severely curtailed

Finally, we zoom in on Cox’s Bazar—the world’s largest refugee camp, located in Bangladesh and home to around a million Rohingya refugees who fled genocide in Myanmar. Because of these funding cuts, that camp is now on the verge of collapse. What will happen if the world’s largest refugee camp just fails?

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