Zabi Sahibzada, refugee resettlement director for Jewish Social Services (JSS) in Madison, Wisconsin, has lived through war, displacement, the collapse of Afghanistan and the cataclysmic consequences of shifting U.S. policies abroad and at home.
Today, even as our country plunges into a new war in the Middle East, the Trump administration has pulled back from its commitments to people who helped the U.S. during the long, brutal war in Afghanistan.
Sahibzada talks to his family every day as they cope with the hardships of living under Taliban rule. He had hoped to bring his family to the U.S. as part of a family reunification program for people who helped our country in Afghanistan. But that program was suspended by President Donald Trump. Now his family is in limbo. He is particularly concerned about his two daughters, ages 18 and 11, who can no longer go to school because of the ban on education for girls.
Meanwhile, Sahibzada is managing a program that has been severely disrupted by the Trump administration, which set a record-low refugee admissions ceiling of only 7,500 people for Fiscal Year 2026 — down from 125,000 the previous year — with most slots reserved for white South Africans. JSS is no longer resettling hundreds of refugees from around the world in South Central Wisconsin. Instead, the group is focused on continuing to serve the people it has already resettled here. Part of that work involves fielding panicked calls from people who are losing their status as the Trump administration strips protections from those who fled to the U.S. seeking a safe haven from persecution.
Because of funding cuts, JSS, which traces its roots to the Madison Welfare Fund, created in 1940 to help resettle Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, has had to let go of most of its staff. “Currently we have three full-time case managers that are working with a huge population that’s already here, and we cannot afford more,” Sahibzada said.
JSS works with about 450 people, most of them in Dane County. Among the services the group provides are help with finding employment, health care, housing, language instruction and financial assistance for up to five years. The organization is scrambling to raise money privately to make up for the loss of federal funds.
Sahibzada estimates that staff salaries cost JSS about $300,000 per year, with another $250,000 going to cover direct assistance for clients — but that amount rises and falls depending on need. This year, he expects need to rise significantly because of Trump administration policies, including the cancellation of Temporary Protected Status for people from Afghanistan and Haiti.
“Those people, they’re not having documents anymore to work,” he said. “They’re losing their job, they’re losing their driving license, they cannot renew it. And then those will be knocking on our doors that they may need a lot of help … they’ll not be able to pay their rents, they’ll not be able to receive any other benefits from the government. And by the next few months, there will be cuts to health insurance. They’ll be cut from the food assistance or the cash assistance that a lot of people were depending on. So they will be coming and knocking on our doors, and that’s the gap that we may need to fill with the help from the communities.”
The gap, he estimates, will likely be between $300,000 and $400,000.
“I would say it’s a very chaotic moment for all the refugees and immigrants in the country,” Sahibzada said during a recent interview in his office on the west side of Madison.
Confronting chaos is, unfortunately, a familiar experience for Sahibzada.
A perilous escape from Afghanistan
Before he came to the United States from Afghanistan in 2022 on a special immigrant visa, Sahibzada worked for USAID in Afghanistan for more than a decade. As a software engineer, he helped create a text-messaging system that allowed farmers to get timely information about agricultural markets, and he was the main point of contact for people in rural areas in his region who wanted to get in touch with USAID-funded projects. “My name was the contact person on billboards and brochures and reference cards,” he said. “Everyone in the community knew my name. They knew my face.”
That was a dangerous position to be in as the Taliban came back into power. Even before the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s resurgence, Sahibzada began receiving threatening calls and social media warnings. He was approved for a special immigrant visa for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government — a program President Donald Trump suspended this year — but he had no idea how he would get out of the country, he said. The U.S. government offered to help him relocate to Doha, Qatar.
“That was a time where it was not easy to go through the custom borders in Afghanistan, like, through the airport,” he said. “I was afraid, like … how can I just go and will they allow me, or will they just keep me in prison, or will they just, I don’t know what will happen to me.”
“Thankfully, I made it to the airplane,” he said. He attributes his escape in part to the fact that he used an unfamiliar, formal name on his passport. “When I was working with USAID, my name was Sunny, which is like my nickname,” he explained. But on his passport, “I just put my last name as Sahibzada, which is our family name. So that helped me. When I was going to the airport, I was like, OK, whatever they’re having on their list will be not similar as what I have on my passport.” As a result, he thinks, he was able to slip past the Taliban and fly to Doha and from there, after a month-long process of vetting and background checks, to Wisconsin, where he has been living and working since December 2022.
After resettling in Madison, Sahibzada got a job with the Milwaukee transit system, and commuted to work for a couple of months. He started at JSS in 2023 as a program manager and was promoted this year to direct the resettlement program.
During the time he has worked at JSS, much has changed.
A lot of clients call JSS with legal questions, worried that they might be deported. “We are connecting them with legal service providers,” Sahibzada said, “because we cannot answer.”
The group is planning “know your rights” and emergency preparedness training sessions for April, and working on creating a hotline for ICE sightings, staffed by volunteers speaking multiple languages, coordinated statewide with Wisconsin’s eight refugee services agencies.
Meanwhile, Sahibzada calls home every morning and evening to talk with his family, including his parents, his wife and his two daughters and three sons. “It’s really hard just staying home, not going out, and not going to school,” he said of his daughters. When he talks to them, “They’re always asking me, ‘What’s gonna happen?’ And I’m just giving them sometimes, like some false hopes that it will get better, which I don’t think it will in the very near future, but this is the hope that I’m giving.”
His family, seeking to join him in the U.S., traveled to Pakistan during the Biden administration and waited for months to have their papers processed by the U.S. embassy there. But their visas expired and they were forced to return to Afghanistan. Now, with the new U.S. immigration restrictions, things have gotten even more difficult. Sahibzada continues to hold out hope that things will eventually improve.
“I’m hopeful that it gets changed, either with this administration or any other administration in the future,” he said. “I’m hopeful that this will change and people will be turning back to their normal life.”
More information about making a donation or volunteering is available on the JSS website
