The Fragile Peace of North Carolina’s Refugee Community

This past January, my partner and I were sitting in our garage, drinking coffee and enjoying the predictable choreography of a Tuesday morning in our quiet neighborhood: cars warming up in driveways, school buses making their rounds, neighbors easing into the day.  For me, these routines have always made the place feel both deeply lived-in and entirely provisional. This was the type of stability I dreamed of when I came to America nearly two decades ago. 

The quiet broke with a text from a neighbor a few houses down, a retired white woman who often keeps watch over the street. A cluster of police cruisers and black SUVs had gathered near her driveway. “Get inside,” she wrote, convinced she was witnessing an immigration raid. I shut the garage door and went upstairs to look out the window.  Though I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, my body immediately reacted to the flashing lights.

Later, we’d learn that this was not immigration related; police were serving a local warrant. But even as the situation resolved, I couldn’t relax. I saw myself as a child again, standing in the biting mountain air of my homeland in South Asia, watching armed men from an authoritarian regime beat my father and drag him away to prison because they believed—wrongly—that he was plotting against them. Soldiers ransacked our home, confiscated our government-issued documents and our citizenship certificates, and effectively erased our legal existence. Our family was left stateless. 

That was in the early 1990s, and I was the second youngest of eight children. None of us understood what was happening or why our ethnic group was being targeted. For nearly two decades afterward, we survived in a makeshift refugee camp, confined to a bamboo-and-plastic hut with neither electricity nor indoor running water, entirely dependent on meager food rations. 

More than 35 years later, I continue to live with the aftershocks of that ordeal. That’s why this story is published under a pen name, not my real name, and why I hesitate even to state my country of origin. And I’m not alone.  Most of the people I talked to for this story had similar fears; I am using only their initials for that reason.

Since early 2025, when the Trump administration gave immigration officers unprecedented license to enter houses and drag immigrants out of workplaces, refugees across the country have experienced similar moments of reignited trauma. For many, the stability they have found in America does not erase old fears—it sharpens them. The further people are from their displacement, the more fragile permanence can feel.

A Sudden Contraction

Long before the current wave of new immigration policies, coming to the United States as a refugee was not easy. According to the United Nations’ definition, a refugee is someone who has been forced to flee their country because of war, violence, or persecution—the latter of which can be for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.  

Before I was finally approved for resettlement in 2009, I had to navigate two years of security screenings, medical checks, and intensive interviews with the United Nations Refugee Agency, the International Organization for Migration, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  Refugees undergo years of vetting overseas before they are ever allowed to resettle. In November 2025, a federal memo directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to make that process even more arduous, requiring the agency to reinterview roughly 233,000 refugees admitted between January 2021 and February 2025. They would need to reassess their claims of past persecution as well as the current likelihood of danger in their home countries. It also introduced review language around “assimilation” and paused the processing of green card applications, which refugees are legally entitled to apply for after living in the U.S. for a year. 

More than 9,000 refugees in North Carolina are now facing these new review procedures, said Mark Adams, the Durham director of Church World Service, one of the largest providers of refugee services in the state. There are also fewer resources available to help them prepare. Due to the Trump administration’s cuts to federal programs, Adams’ organization has had to reduce its North Carolina staff by more than half. It closed its offices in Charlotte and Burlington and furloughed workers in other locations.

“These decisions are difficult,” Adams wrote in a recent email. “Our staff deeply care about our state, our communities, and our clients. Ultimately, we must be practical given severe external constraints.”

The new policies have required organizations that were once focused on early integration, such as the Charlotte-based Carolina Refugee Resettlement Agency, to shift their daily focus. Marsha Hirsch, the agency’s executive director, explained that they have been guiding concerned clients through the process of organizing essential documents and copies of status-related paperwork.

Among the cases Adams finds most troubling are those of two clients who previously worked with the U.S. military overseas and later received Special Immigrant Visas status—a separate classification for Iraqis and Afghans who supported the U.S. war effort. Despite having previously secured Special Immigrant Visas, these individuals now find their legal protections effectively undermined under renewed government scrutiny, leaving them to pursue asylum as a last-resort defense against deportation. Another client received notice that his green card had been rescinded, which would trigger removal proceedings, only to learn it was a clerical error. 

“Today, many refugees are living with a level of fear and uncertainty we have not seen in years,” said Adam Clark, the executive director of World Relief Durham, another provider of refugee services in the Triangle. “Shifting policies, funding uncertainty, and an increasingly complex environment make it harder to provide the consistent support families need,” he said.

The Impact Up Close

For many refugees, these developments are not abstract policy debates unfolding in Washington. Their consequences arrive every day through television broadcasts and social media feeds. 

In January, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening. The program, which initially focused on 5,600 refugees in Minnesota, gave minimally trained immigration enforcement officers unprecedented license to pursue anyone they viewed as suspect. 

They detained more than 100 refugees, including children, and killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti during protests. This pattern of violence claimed further lives as the year progressed, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián\ Durán Guerrero in Maine. Videos of these deaths played on a near-constant loop for months.

K.K., a 43-year-old refugee from Bhutan who requested he be identified only by his initials, was one of nearly 100,000 ethnic Nepalis forcibly evicted in the early 1990s. He spent over 15 years building a life in North Carolina before moving to Ohio late last year. He remains anchored to North Carolina, making regular trips back to visit his family members in Raleigh and Charlotte, all of whom are naturalized former refugees. He said the tone of conversation has shifted. Everyone now circles around old anxieties.

When we spoke recently via FaceTime, K.K. gave me a virtual tour of the garden where he grows many of the same vegetables found in the Himalayas, like hot chilis that make the perfect ema datshi, a famous dish in Bhutan. He stopped, wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his long-sleeved T-shirt—already heavy with visible wetness—and took a deep breath before talking about how the past 18 months have really felt.

“I thought I was past that,” he said. “But hearing the news about immigration enforcement brings back that fear. You start wondering whether your papers are enough and whether you really belong. I have children born here who hear these stories and ask questions. This doesn’t affect only us. It reaches the next generation, too.”

I hear stories like this everywhere. J.M. spent a decade as a refugee in Kenya after he was expelled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo over a combination of political repression, security operations, and the ongoing effects of armed conflict in 2014. He arrived in the United States and settled in the Triangle-Triad region with his family a few years ago, hoping they had finally found safety. That sense of security has unraveled. 

“Often I fear whenever I see police cars that they might arrest me,” said J.M., who has a green card but has not yet become a U.S. citizen. “I don’t feel good. … I thought coming to this country was all safe, but it appears not.”

Similarly,  D.D.,  a refugee from the same country I am from who now lives in Charlotte, took no chances when immigration officers began raids in North Carolina last November. His brother holds an active green card but isn’t naturalized yet, so D.D. told him to stay inside at all hours. “I couldn’t risk him being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “With the way things are right now, even a green card doesn’t make you feel safe. If he gets picked up, we have no safety net to get him back.”

“We came to this country to live a free life,” A.S., a naturalized citizen who spent over a decade as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Afghanistan before resettling in Charlotte, told me. “When we saw ICE agents stopping even naturalized citizens, I was worried—and still am—that it might happen to me.” 

That anxiety, experts say, is rooted deep in the psychological overlap of current stressors and past trauma. “This can be understood as a reaction to contemporary stressful experiences that becomes intensified and shaped by a past traumatic experience,” explains Dr. Rochelle Frounfelker, a social epidemiologist at Lehigh University who has spent the last decade working alongside several refugee communities to improve mental health support and psychosocial well-being.  

While many Americans understand that military veterans can struggle with post-traumatic stress decades after war, Frounfelker noted they often fail to extend that same empathy to refugees. “Exposure to war and conflict can affect the mental health of individuals decades after the initial experience,” she said. “Refugees often carry similar psychological burdens long after they have reached physical safety.”

The Paradox of Safety

Long before I understood what citizenship meant, I knew that a few pieces of paper could determine whether a family belonged. I watched adults slip documents into plastic bags and hide them beneath bedding or inside the woven bamboo walls of our hut in the refugee camp. They always feared another search, another confiscation, or another loss to fire, which was common in our settlement. To the people in power, we were just numbers, and numbers can be easily erased.

In the camp all those years ago, my response was to make myself visible.  I worked as a journalist, covering resettlement, addressing the concerns of dissenters, and attempting to correct the abundance of rumors and mistruths. Even though I was often targeted for my work, fear was a distant emotion; I had nothing to lose, so I had nothing to fear.

I carried that belief system with me to America, and it didn’t waver. I volunteered to help other newly arrived refugees find their footing, and that work soon became my career. Over the last decade, I have worked inside multiple resettlement agencies across different cities, helping to build support programs from scratch. I always assured my refugee clients that the United States was a place where they could speak freely.

Even during President Trump’s first term, I wrote articles, gave interviews, and criticized policies I believed unfairly targeted refugee communities. I rarely hesitated before speaking publicly. But the second term feels different. I have caught myself weighing risks I once dismissed without a second thought.

My American passport, for example, expired almost two years ago. Renewing it should be routine, but I keep putting it off because I fear additional vetting. The expired booklet sits in a fireproof box alongside the other important documents my family depends on. The matching passport ID card, also long expired, remains in my wallet. I know these documents have nothing to do with the camps of my childhood. Still, the hesitation remains.

When the sirens wailed outside my garage that January morning, I knew they were not coming for us. But the terror they triggered was entirely real, unearthing buried memories and exposing how quickly a sense of permanence can dissolve into thin air. Are we safe here? Were we ever?

That question does not belong to the refugees alone; it now rests with the communities that welcomed them, the neighborhoods they integrated into, and the state they chose to help build. Permanence, it turns out, is not a document signed or a decade passed; it is the simple, fragile grace of believing that tomorrow will look like today.