I’ve been thinking about borders for a few months now. The last time we had our current president, he talked a lot about building a wall between Mexico and the U.S. There’s been less talk of a wall this time around. Turns out, in the 21^st century, a wall isn’t the most effective way to stop people coming into your country. It’s bureaucracy. Visas, passports, customs, resident status. You can stop a lot more people by changing rules than building a wall, and that’s what Trump has done this time. One of the rules he changed—this was on his very first day in office—was about refugees.

As you may know (I didn’t), the president has a lot of control over how many refugees enter the United States. Every year, the president decides how many refugees the country will accept. In Obama’s last year in office, about 85 thousand refugees resettled here. In the last year of Trump’s first term, it was about 12 thousand. Biden brought it up to a hundred thousand. And then, as soon as he got back into office, Trump completely suspended the program, meaning zero refugees would be admitted to the United States.

A few years ago, Exodus Refugee, an Indianapolis-based organization that helps refugees resettle, opened an office here in Bloomington. I wanted to understand how Trump’s suspension of refugee resettlement has affected the office here, and the people they help, and to understand that, I thought it would be good to hear the story of how the office got started.

Erin Aquino is the founding director of the Bloomington office. Exodus has been around as an organization since 1981, but Erin got called in to start the Bloomington office at the beginning of 2022. When she took the job, she’s imagined having a few months to get things set up. But she ended up moving a lot faster than anyone expected. Which was good, because she you can’t meet with clients in a hotel room, and the post office was getting tired of all the carseats.

On this episode, Erin Aquino tells us how to set up a refugee resettlement office when the refugees have already started arriving. And what’s happened since January 20^th.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.