A few years ago, an Iraqi refugee walked out of a Walmart and saw two police officers heading towards him. He dropped his bags and raised his arms.
The officers came over, lowered his arms, and shook his hand.
He told Lubna Zeidan the story, laughing. By then he’d been in Austin for years. He was learning not to fear the authorities.
For two decades, Zeidan and her colleagues at Interfaith Action of Central Texas had told refugees the same thing. Don’t be afraid of the police. You’re here legally. You’re fine.
“That is the spiel,” she says, “that we are now uncomfortable saying.”
World Refugee Day falls on June 20 every year, a date established by the United Nations to honor people forced from their homes in search of safety. Austin’s celebration this year will be held a week earlier, on June 13. In Austin, it has been marked since 2005, when Zeidan and staff from local refugee service agencies organized a potluck picnic at Walnut Creek Park and invited whoever wanted to come.
The event moved as it grew — Guero’s on Congress, then an Episcopal seminary. In 2008, St. David’s Episcopal Church hosted the first naturalization ceremony for refugees becoming citizens, with a federal judge presiding in the church hall. The following year, the Bullock Texas State History Museum offered to host. It stayed for 15 years, with the exception of 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic moved the celebration online.
This year, the Bullock won’t host.
After the 2025 event, Zeidan’s contact at the museum reached out before the usual July debrief.
“We decided that we’re not going to continue with this event,” she was told.
The reason, she was told, was the U.S. 250th anniversary — the museum had too many commitments tied to it. Zeidan pressed. Was this just for 2026? Could they return the following year?
The decision was permanent.
“I felt this came from the top,” Zeidan says.
The Bullock no longer hosting was on the laundry list of challenges organizers and community members with the Community Coalition for Neighborhood Stability (CCNS), volunteers with KOOP Radio, and others worked tirelessly to beat; as the very existence of Austin’s World Refugee Day as an in-person event was threatened.
Looking back, Zeidan saw a pattern. Questions from museum staff had grown more pointed. A new director had come in.
The Bullock is not a private institution. It is a division of the Texas State Preservation Board, a state agency that reports to the Governor’s office. Its director, Margaret Koch, was elected in 2024 as Presiding Chair of the Texas America250 Commission — the same anniversary cited as the reason for the museum’s withdrawal.
The museum had a different account. Emily Henne ,the Bullock’s deputy director of communications, said the citizenship ceremony was “the cornerstone of the event” — and that it was USCIS, not the museum, that withdrew first. “We were notified earlier this year that USCIS would not be using our venue for 2026,” she wrote, adding the agency might return in the future. She said the Texas State Preservation Board played no role. “The decision was made by our partners for this year.”
The reason Zeidan was given — too many commitments tied to the U.S. 250th anniversary — does not appear in Henne’s response.
The naturalization ceremony has been the emotional center of the event for 15 years — the moment refugees stood in the Texas Spirit Theater and became citizens. It will not happen this year. Whether its absence caused the Bullock’s withdrawal or resulted from it depends on who you ask.
The City of Austin offered the organizers any city venue they wanted, free of charge. They chose the Asian American Resource Center — familiar to many refugee families, and close to where they live. Houmma Garba, the city’s acting immigrant affairs manager, is coordinating city departments to run a resource fair alongside the celebration.
The celebration runs June 13, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
“Any participants, any attendees — we’re just going to welcome them and celebrate,” Garba says. “Not canceling.”
For 15 years at the Bullock, it was one of the few days when Austin’s refugee communities — from Iraq, Syria, Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and dozens of other countries — could walk into a state institution and be honored rather than processed. The citizenship ceremony took place in the Texas Spirit Theater. Performers and the main celebration filled the lobby; activities spread across all three floors. The museum offered free exhibit entry for refugees and a year of free membership for new citizens. Year after year, a federal judge administered the oath of citizenship to people who had waited years — sometimes decades — for that moment.
Zeidan remembers the Iraqi families who first came in 2007 and 2008, who no longer need iACT’s services but have never stopped coming back. One of them called her in a panic one spring.
“I couldn’t find the ad for World Refugee Day,” he told her. “I know it’s almost June. I just want to know that it’s happening. Is it at the Bullock as usual?”
“This event especially,” says Safaa Al Mahamid, who MCs the celebration, “is about community choosing to show up for itself.” Community choosing to show up for itself is central to Safaa’s appreciation of KOOP Radio, “KOOP has been one of the few media spaces where refugee communities can directly speak for themselves and tell their own stories in their own voices.”
In 2024, Director Margaret Koch wrote that the Bullock was proud to have “welcomed new citizens, acknowledging their journeys, their contributions to our communities and their commitment to establishing a home in Texas” for more than 15 years.
Texas has been the top refugee-receiving state in the country for most of the past decade, taking in about 44,000 refugees — more than any other state. In fiscal year 2022, Texas resettled 2,118 refugees as the Biden administration began rebuilding a program gutted under the first Trump administration. By fiscal year 2023, that number had risen to 5,039. By fiscal year 2024, Texas received 9,768 refugees — the highest in decades — as the national total hit 100,034, the most in 30 years.
On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, President Trump suspended the refugee admissions program. In fiscal year 2025, Texas received 3,923 refugees, nearly all of them arriving in the three and a half months before the suspension. After January 20, essentially zero. The admissions ceiling for fiscal year 2026 has been set at 7,500 nationally — the lowest in the program’s 45-year history.
This is not new for Texas. In January 2020, Gov. Greg Abbott became the first governor in the country to formally reject refugee resettlement, writing to the secretary of state that Texas had “a responsibility to dedicate available resources to those who are already here.” His letter conflated legal refugees — people vetted for years through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees before being matched with resettlement countries — with undocumented immigration. At the time, Texas was the single largest refugee-receiving state in the nation.
Weeks after suspending the refugee program, Trump issued an executive order prioritizing admissions for Afrikaners — the white, largely Dutch-descended minority of South Africa — citing what the administration called racial discrimination against them. South Africa’s government has rejected those claims. Halfway through fiscal year 2026, all but three of the 4,499 refugees admitted to the United States had come from South Africa.
Refugees who had been vetted for years — Afghans, Congolese, Syrians, Somalis — wait in camps.
Federal refugee funding to Texas agencies stopped in January 2025. Programs like iACT’s have continued only because the Texas Office for Refugees — an affiliate of Catholic Charities of Fort Worth — had reserves left from prior years. Those reserves won’t last.
“There is a lot of money that was coming to Texas,” Zeidan says of the roughly $10 million in annual federal refugee funding that has now stopped. “And they’re forcing these agencies to lay people off.”
The Afghan refugees who arrived in the 2021 airlift were given humanitarian visas and promised a pathway to asylum. That pathway has been eliminated. An iACT client from Afghanistan, a mother with a 3-year-old American-born daughter, had her green card appointment postponed indefinitely.
“Why am I here?” she asked Zeidan. “I was afraid in Afghanistan, but my family was around me. Here I’m by myself and I’m afraid. I have nowhere to turn.”
“We tell people that democracy is the best thing in the world,” Zeidan says. “And yet, if every administration is going to renege on the previous administration’s promises — well, it sounds to them like it’s better to have somebody who’s there all the time.”
Lubna Zeidan grew up in Lebanon during the civil war. She taught school there, releasing students early on days when the shooting started, navigating routes home that avoided snipers. She moved to Austin in 2001 and joined Interfaith Action of Central Texas the following year, when the entire refugee program was her, part-time, and one teacher. She built it into something that served more than a thousand people a year. She has since stepped back from the director role, but still leads the Austin Refugee Roundtable — a loose network of 26 organizations — because there is no one else with the time and the institutional memory to do it.
Her philosophy has not changed in 20 years. “When working with refugees, respect, acceptance and a genuine smile are more important than expertise.”
Safaa Al Mahamid spent nearly two decades working with international NGOs — UNHCR, UNICEF — building educational and vocational institutions for refugees in the Middle East before moving to Austin. She runs the Community Coalition for Neighborhood Stability, a nonprofit she co-founded that serves Myanmar, Afghan, and Middle Eastern communities in Austin. She MCs World Refugee Day. This year, with the Bullock gone, and resources gone with it, she is also booking performers, coordinating sound, and raising money through her personal network.
When the Austin Refugee Roundtable voted on whether to hold this year’s event in person or move it online, iACT’s leadership had been leaning toward online, given the fear in the community and the lack of resources. Al-Mahamid mobilized. CCNS, the organization consulted community members and took on the work of making an in-person event happen, even securing the vote of all CCNS leaders and volunteers for the individual vote.
“This event has been happening for nearly 20 years in person,” Al Mahamid said. “That’s really dangerous — in the meaning that for the feeling of stability, you are giving them a message that you are not stable, more than what they are already living in.”
The roundtable voted to hold the event in person.
Houmma Garba came to the city of Austin after years working refugee resettlement at Caritas of Austin. As acting immigrant affairs manager, she inherited the situation — the Bullock out, the roundtable scrambling, the event six weeks away. The city’s answer was yes before the question was fully asked.
When Al Mahamid told community members the event might go online — that there was no money for food, no budget for performers — they asked what they could do. “I really saw in practice that those people are, even with no resources, willing to volunteer.” she said.
I really saw in practice that those people are, even with no resources, willing to volunteer.”
“The prejudgement,” she says “is that they are here to receive money.” The characterisations of refugees’ motivation to flee their homes, often blurred by ideas of the American dream and falsehoods of seeking luxury, obfuscate the reality of what these refugees survive to get here, years in camps, dictatorship, war, displacement.
“A family I met while discussing World Refugee Day told me they waited since 2012 and lived in a tent in Jordan before finally being approved to come here last year,” she said. “People are not leaving destroyed countries and surviving all of these processes to pursue an “easy” life. They are trying to survive, rebuild, belong and contribute.”
For Al Mahamid, the increased level of anxiety in the refugee population only highlights the importance of collective action. “If one of us cannot show up because she has fear, because she could be targeted or at risk, then someone else can show up.”
World Refugee Day 2026 runs June 13, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., at the Asian American Resource Center.
* All data compiled and interviews graciously conducted by Juan Raigosa.