Trump to issue economic policy in Las Vegas as Senate works to confirm cabinet – BBC

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Trump’s order to freeze foreign aid appears to have had immediate effects.

Sean Vandiver, president of the non-profit #afghanevac, which supports Afghan refugees who have worked with the US, told the BBC it had an immediate impact on many of those his organization helps.

Vandiver explains that the order is a functional pause in the Special Immigrant Visa Program. While the process of getting someone approved to enter the program or the visa interview is still ongoing, relocation flights and housing resettlement funding have been paused.

“I think they didn’t know where all the foreign aid money went and how it was being sent,” he said of the Trump administration’s decision to accept the State Department order.

Vandiver says refugee families or someone from the Special Immigrant Visa Program are stuck in Limbo.

He emphasized that special immigrant visas and refugees are legal immigration pathways to the United States that are distinct from the illegal immigration and border security issues that Trump has championed.

“We’ve just spent the last three and a half years rebuilding that system… We kept our wartime promises to our allies — even if it wasn’t fast enough. We used to do that and now we’re not,” says Vandiver.

#AfgHaneVac called on the Trump administration to provide immediate release for affected Afghans in a letter that Vandiver says described what “will happen if they don’t apply a scalpel, not a hatch.”