CEO of Center for Victims of Torture: Ending foreign aid slams the door on hope

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On a cold rainy morning last October, I sat in a tent in a crowded displacement camp in northern Ethiopia. The tarpaulin tent operated as an improvised clinic for the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), an international nonprofit based in St. Paul. Our clients started arriving one by one, careful not to traipse more mud inside. They had all fled from western Tigray during the recent civil war. Many had lost their families, their land and their hope.

The group counseling session was about depression and suicide prevention. A number of these grieving and displaced civilians spoke about people in the camp who had recently killed themselves. Some talked about how they had also contemplated ending their own lives. Traditional Tigrayan bread was passed around as the CVT counselor offered advice on how to process their collective trauma — and how to continue living.

I’ve had similar experiences at other places where CVT works around the world. In Jordan, CVT has helped more than 6,600 Syrian refugees who have experienced torture under the former Assad regime or have survived airstrikes, massacres and other atrocities. At Nguenyyiel refugee camp, on Ethiopia’s remote western border, I met South Sudanese children, some of whom had literally walked alone out of the war zone after having lost their parents. I asked a 12-year-old boy why he came to the therapy sessions. “Because I want to live,” was his heartbreaking answer.

Then, without warning on Jan. 24, just days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. government ordered us to immediately cease work on all these programs. Offices were shuttered. Doors were locked. The tent clinic in Tigray, which was funded by USAID, was closed. Then on Feb. 26 — without being able to participate in any review — our federal grants were abruptly terminated via a short email that ended with “God bless America.”

Those who are impacted the most by these closures are people who have already suffered at the hands of some of the world’s worst human rights abusers. I don’t know what is going to happen to that young South Sudanese boy who just wants to live, or to the people in that tent in Tigray, or those Syrian refugees. But I know that the world is now a darker place for them.

In 2024, CVT provided direct healing care to 24,793 survivors and their family members around the world, and helped more than 50,000 through affiliated programs. In Ethiopia alone, we cared for more than 13,000 people. Hundreds also came through the doors of our three clinics in St. Paul and St. Cloud in Minnesota. In all, over the last four decades, more than 200,000 people, including torture survivors from 88 countries, have received services from CVT.

All that is now under threat. We have lost 75% of our $36 million budget and have had to furlough or end the employment of over 430 staff around the world. That includes dozens of jobs in the Twin Cities and across the American Midwest.

Our clients, meanwhile, are terrified. Even those living in the Twin Cities have expressed fear that despite being in the U.S. legally, they might be mistakenly arrested by ICE and deported back to the regimes that tortured them. Some re-traumatized refugee parents are now afraid to leave their homes or to send their children to school.

Despite these devastating funding cuts, CVT is still operating in Minnesota, Georgia and Arizona, and some of our smaller international programs will survive, albeit with significantly reduced scale and scope. But at a time of unprecedented global crisis — with the United Nations reporting that 120 million people are currently displaced by persecution, conflict and atrocities — we should be scaling up, not downsizing.

Something that has been missing from much of the public debate around U.S. foreign aid is not how much it costs (less than 1% of the federal budget), but how much the United States profits from its beneficence. All true global powers recognize the value of “soft power.” Helping to fund Ebola prevention in West Africa, poverty eradication in Latin America, and supporting human rights defenders in the Middle East, is all in the interest of American taxpayers. It is an investment in making the world, and this country, safer and more secure. Dare I say it, such generosity also helps make America great.