The U.S. refugee program, long a pillar of American foreign policy, has experienced dramatic ups and downs in recent years.

During his first term, President-elect Donald Trump drastically reduced the annual refugee cap. In 2020, the final full year of that term, the United States admitted about 11,000 refugees, a record low.

Then President Joe Biden revived the program. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, about 100,000 refugees arrived to the country, the largest tally in nearly three decades.

Now, with Trump vowing to crack down on immigration again, refugee resettlement agencies are bracing to be gutted. They are scrambling to secure funding to keep alive operations that support refugees already in the country and are trying to expedite the arrivals of people waiting in camps in Kenya, Jordan and Uganda.

“It makes my heart clench when I see a family scheduled to arrive after Jan. 20,” said Cynthia Shabb, executive director of Global Friends Coalition, a nonprofit in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that receives refugees from around the world.

“If Trump shuts resettlement down, no one will come,” said Shabb, as she scanned a list of people from Afghanistan, Somalia and Central America who are expected to arrive in the coming months.

Trump has promised an immigration agenda that targets not only immigrants in the country illegally but also the country’s refugee resettlement program, which he said on social platform X in September that he would immediately “suspend.”

Project 2025, a policy blueprint crafted for the next Republican administration, suggests the incoming president cite the record number of migrant crossings that occurred under the Biden administration as justification for halting refugee resettlement.

A former Trump administration official, Kiron K. Skinner, recommends that the president-elect shift resources from the refugee program to the border and that refugee admissions be suspended altogether.

In Project 2025, Skinner wrote that the federal government’s obligation to reallocate national security resources “to the forged border crisis will necessitate an indefinite curtailment” of refugee admissions. The program, however, is notably separate from other forms of immigration, as illegal migrants crossing the border are processed differently from refugees, who are fully vetted and approved for resettlement before arriving.

For decades, the U.S. refugee resettlement program reflected America’s ambition to be a world leader in human rights. And whether a Republican or a Democrat was in the White House, support for refugees was strong.

As Trump’s inauguration approaches, anxiety is rippling through refugee communities. Many Syrians, for instance, have been admitted to the country in recent years.

While Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, has been overthrown and exiled, conditions on the ground after almost 14 years of civil war remain precarious, and the country’s outlook remains uncertain. People assigned for resettlement in the United States remain eager to come.

Lana Alsharif and her husband, Abdul, fled Syria’s civil war and reached Egypt in 2013. They were assigned for resettlement in the United States, but their case languished while Trump was in office.

In September, the couple finally arrived in California with their two daughters, who are 2 and 4, and were resettled in California, by HIAS.

Alsharif’s parents are booked on flights to the United States later this month, but her sister and her family still do not have a travel date.

“We are happy that our parents are arriving, but our happiness is not complete,” she said, “because when there is a new president, we don’t think my sister will be allowed to come.”