Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) continues to thrive despite a presidential Executive Order temporarily suspending operations of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). In fact, ECAR has gained a new campus chapter in New York just this week.
One of ECAR’s many roles is as a consortium member of Welcome Corps on Campus, a program under USRAP through which colleges and universities directly sponsor talented refugee students. While Welcome Corps on Campus has been temporarily halted, ECAR’s core operations continue apace.
ECAR campuses nationwide are hosting and integrating refugees who have already arrived in the U.S. as well as those who will arrive as exemptions to the Executive Order. Through various training courses, technical assistance and ongoing support mechanisms, ECAR also continues to build the capacity of U.S. colleges and universities to be more welcoming to newcomers.
In an interview published as a front-page print edition story on Feb. 15 for the News and Record, Diya Abdo, ECAR founder and Guilford College’s Lincoln Financial Professor of English, outlined challenges for the work of the 10-year-old organization she founded with support from the Center for Principled Problem Solving and Excellence in Teaching.
“I feel frustrated that a program we were rebuilding successfully, a program that lived up to the promise of America as a land of welcome and opportunity, was so summarily shuttered,” she stated in the News and Record interview.
ECAR’s flagship chapter at Guilford, now one of 21 ECAR campuses, has hosted 100 refugees since 2015.
Diya is a second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan and a naturalized U.S. citizen. She is author of American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience (2022). As a testament to North Carolina’s long and vital history of welcoming immigrants and refugees, her book was selected as a 2024 North Carolina Reads book and an Alamance Reads 2024 book.
Diya also expressed optimism in the newspaper interview:
“Presidents and executive orders come and go, but higher education institutions have stood for decades, some of them for centuries,” she stated. “America will open its doors again, and we will be more than ready when it does.”
For more information about ECAR and its ongoing and new projects, please visit www.everycampusarefuge.net
Read the entire News & Record story here (subject to paywall).