Maia Nehme, Contributing Photographer

Up until Feb. 14, Azad Mousou’s daily routine included a 45-minute commute to the office of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, or IRIS, New Haven’s refugee resettlement program.

Mousou, who immigrated to the United States from Syria in 2012, began working at IRIS as an Arabic and Kurdish interpreter in February 2023, and later became a case manager on the agency’s resettlement and placement team. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 24 stop-work order to refugee resettlement programs nationwide, Mousou spent those daily car rides worrying about losing his job at IRIS.

“I drop my kids every morning at school … and one day I told them, ‘guys, I might get laid off,’” Mousou recalled. “After two days, [my son] told me, ‘Dad, I was praying today before I slept that you don’t get laid off, because I know how much you love your clients.’”

At the start of February, Mousou learned that eight members of his 10-person team had been laid off because of funding cuts. Within two weeks, Mousou and his remaining colleague were let go, too.

IRIS boasted 94 staff members prior to Trump’s inauguration. The agency had been set to receive $4 million in federal funding in 2025, all of which was rescinded because of Trump’s stop-work order. 

Over the past two and a half months, these funding cuts have forced IRIS’s Executive Director Maggie Mitchell Salem to winnow the staff down to 34 members. Salem said these layoffs have impacted each of IRIS’s departments, including the senior management team, which shrunk from four to two members.

The agency was also forced to close its Hartford office at the beginning of the month and plans to shut down its New Haven office, from which IRIS has operated since 2006, on April 30. 

“We’re doing this because we want to reduce our overhead in order to continue serving [refugees],” Salem said, describing the impetus behind shutting down the offices. “It’s about making really hard choices, and all nonprofits are having to do this right now.”

IRIS staff will be able to meet with clients from its food pantry at 75 Hamilton St., which distributes food and other household items each Wednesday, according to Salem. The agency is also continuing to offer education programming at United Church on the Green, located at 270 Temple St., and staff will begin to meet with clients and use some office storage space at the church. Otherwise, IRIS staff will work remotely.

Kathy Sheppard, who managed IRIS’s Ukrainian program from August 2022 to November 2023, felt compelled to help IRIS after learning about the federal funding cuts. Over the past few months, Sheppard — along with former IRIS employees Barbara Davis, Cindy Dunn and Kristy Jefferson, who were laid off the day of the stop-work order  — has mobilized IRIS’s volunteer program in hopes of keeping the agency afloat.

Since Feb. 27, IRIS has gained 214 volunteers across nine teams, which assist refugees with financial literacy, finding employment and other needs, according to Sheppard. 154 of the volunteers are members of the flex team, which means that they are willing to do additional volunteer work outside of their designated teams. 

Each time an IRIS staff member has a task they need a volunteer to take on, they add it to a spreadsheet. Then, Sheppard, Davis, Dunn and Jefferson — who have dubbed themselves “admins” of the volunteer program — assign the task to a volunteer from the relevant team or the flex team and keep track of when tasks are completed.

“Our case managers would have to have 72 hours in the day in order to respond to everyone’s phone calls and the questions, so we’re hoping our volunteers can fill in and answer some of those more simple questions,” Sheppard said.

Each of the volunteer teams is headed by a team leader, whether a member of a co-sponsorship group who has experience working with refugee families or a former IRIS employee. Mousou has led the crisis response team since mid-March. 

Setting up the volunteer program required a significant time commitment from the four admins, who are also volunteers, according to Dunn, who described it as “almost [a] full time job” for the first few weeks. Dunn estimates that she now spends around three hours a day keeping the volunteer program running.

Dunn and Sheppard expressed confidence that their volunteer model is a sustainable one, noting that the Trump administration halted the admission of refugees on Jan. 20, which will eventually ease up the backlog of tasks for IRIS staff.

As of now, the four admins are laser-focused on keeping the volunteer program running smoothly. Davis and Dunn initially looked for work after getting laid off by IRIS but are concentrated on the volunteer program, and in Davis’s case, continuing to lead a co-sponsorship group in Danbury. Similarly, Mousou is focused on helping his former clients. 

“Volunteering got me out of that funk of, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with myself, and I don’t know what to do to help people,” Dunn said. “Not only does it help IRIS, but I think it helps the three of us.”

Both Davis and Mousou noted that their spouses are still employed full-time, which helped them justify devoting themselves to volunteer work from a financial standpoint. 

The three former staff members hope to return to work in refugee resettlement, and specifically to IRIS, in the near future.

“It’s horrific to leave some of the most vulnerable people in the world stranded without services,” Davis said, reflecting on the federal funding cuts. “It’s unimaginable that any administration would think that that was something that was a good way to draw down a program — to leave people so exposed to such risk.”

IRIS assisted 2,055 clients, who spanned 25 home countries, in 2024.

Correction, April 4: A previous version of the article misattributed statements made by Mousou.