IRIS To Shutter Main Office

New Haven’s flagship refugee resettlement agency is closing its main doors at 235 Nicoll St. and shifting to remote work and satellite locations after losing millions of dollars in federal funding.

Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) has occupied the Nicoll Street office since 2006, where it has provided case management, education, job training, legal support, and health assistance to many hundreds of refugees and immigrants over decades.

In an email on Wednesday afternoon, Executive Director Maggie Mitchell Salem announced that due to funding slashes under President Donald Trump’s administration, the organization will cease operating from its East Rock home base by the end of March, with official plans to leave by April 30.

She told the Independent the organization is also ​“in the process of winding down our Hartford office.”

Mitchell Salem said in a phone interview that IRIS has so far laid off about half of its staff members since the start of the Trump administration. Now IRIS has a full-time staff of 45 employees.

IRIS will continue operating education programs out of the United Church on the Green’s Parish House at 323 Temple St., as well as its food pantry at 75 Hamilton St. Many employees will shift toward remote work, Mitchell Salem said, while ​“client-facing” staff may be able to meet with clients out of the Temple and Hamilton Street locations.

In addition to education and food pantry programs, the agency is focusing on providing case management to the refugees who have arrived in the country most recently.

According to Mitchell Salem, the Trump administration has suspended or canceled approximately half of IRIS’ anticipated $12 million of funding so far through ​“funding freezes, stop-work orders, program suspensions, and ripped-up contracts.” 

Most of those changes stem from the 20 executive orders restricting or ending immigration programs that Trump signed on his first day of office, which according to Mitchell Salem have been implemented at a staggered rate. ​“We fully expect” that more funding will be cut off, she said. 

“We have such fantastic community support and we want to maximize that, so we want to think about how we’re using unrestricted funding,” Mitchell Salem noted. 

She said that IRIS’ hallmark ​“Run for Refugees” last month raised more than $350,000 for the organization, over twice the typical fundraising amount. 

Some of that funding will go toward housing and healthcare for one Afghan family that arrived in the United States on a Special Immigrant Visa in late January. The federal government has canceled funds to aid those visa holders, who are typically in hiding from the Taliban after risking their lives to help U.S. troops during the Afghanistan War. But the family of seven (including a mom who is eight months pregnant) managed to cobble together the funds to make it from Qatar, where they were stranded, to the United States without federal aid.

“We are gonna help them,” Mitchell Salem said. ​“The help we normally provide is not the help we’re gonna be able to provide, which is really hard.”

It’s unclear whether IRIS will someday reopen a central office. ​“I don’t like to see it as permanent,” Mitchell Salem said of the closure. ​“We definitely have plans for the future. We’re trying to meet the urgency of the moment,” but ​“there’s a wider community of immigrants who are needing our services and support.”