The Opinions - My Values ‘Can’t Be Nullified by an Executive Order’

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Kirk Wallace Johnson served with U.S.A.I.D. in Baghdad and Fallujah. When he returned to the United States, he spent much of his career helping thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, many of whom risked their lives working with American troops, gain refugee status in the United States through the List Project. As President Trump closes the door on the American refugee program, Johnson and the Times columnist Lydia Polgreen grapple with how to live now, through Trump’s second term, in the face of a muted resistance movement.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Lydia Polgreen, and I'm a columnist for New York Times Opinion. Since Donald Trump's re-election, I've been having versions of the same conversation with a lot of people in my life. So many of us have lived by the idea that America should be a beacon of hope for immigrants and refugees, and that part of the American Project is taking in people who need our help. So what do we make of the American Project? today in Trump's second term. I grew up in Kenya and Ghana, where my dad worked as an international

development and aid worker. I covered migration and refugees for many years as a foreign correspondent in Africa and Asia. My grandfather fought in World War II and saw America as a force for democracy and freedom. And my father found his own way to continue that tradition by working to help people in poor countries improve their lives. I grew up with the idea that America is a beacon. And I think that in a lot of ways, these early days of the second Trump administration, are really a reminder that there are many tensions in the United States when it comes to how we think about outsiders. So I've been wrestling with this. And I wanted to talk about it all with Kirk Johnson. Kirk worked with USAID in Baghdad and Fallujah during the Iraq War,

and he started the list project to get Iraqis who helped the United States during the war refugee status in America. He's helped thousands of people to get to safety. So how do we respond in this moment when Trump and his allies are trashing these ideals. Kirk, thanks for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. So I was raised, as I said, on this idea that America is a safe harbor for immigrants, particularly for refugees. And I'm curious, how did that idea figure into your upbringing?

Looking back, I realized I had a pretty unusual upbringing in this regard. I grew up in a family that deeply embraced the ideals that used to be. spoke about in your introduction, that America is a place for people to find refuge, to find a new life if they're willing to work hard to contribute to this country. Where it first started was, I think, in 1989, our family opened our home in this small little suburb outside of Chicago to a family of Ukrainian Jewish refugees who were fleeing the then Soviet Union. I was nine years old then, but all the sudden I was, you know, teaching my two new Ukrainian siblings how to play basketball. I was teaching them American slang, and they lived

with us for several years. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I'm also a midwesterner and my grandparents were quite conservative Republicans, but shared a lot of the ideals that you describe. And I think that this idea of offering sanctuary to refugees, I think of it as something that embodied a kind of idea of American greatness and the idea that we, as a strong nation, we could bring in a lot of people that, you know, in some ways could be embraced both by conservatives and by liberals. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the history of the program to admit refugees who helped the United States, which has an interesting party history, let's say. I think a good way of looking at the history of the refugee program, and especially for the...

those who helped us is by looking at the Vietnam War. Most people point to the fall of Saigon and the millions of refugees fleeing as the birth of the modern U.S. refugee admissions program. Now, the American public was not clamoring for us to open our doors. They understandably were exhausted from the war and they're busy with their own lives. But a fascinating, twist in all of this is that President Ford went before the American people and he said, The United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants from all countries. We're a country built by immigrants from all areas of the world. And we've always been a humanitarian nation.

And he said that to do less, would add moral shame to humiliation. Tough words to say. But the president put that flag on the horizon and within a very short period of time, we brought in something on the order of 150,000 Vietnamese refugees, many of whom were those who had worked for the United States government or fought alongside us.

And over the course of the next decade, there was roughly a million, that were admitted to our country. This action led by the president and funded by Congress triggered something really wonderful in the country, which was a widespread rolling up our sleeves by church groups, by other civic groups, all over the country Americans rose to the task

of helping these newcomers find their way here. And because of the scale of the people that we admitted, that sort of set the mold for the next generation plus of how we admit refugees and our priorities. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth remembering that the great shame of the United States failure during World War II to open its doors to Jewish refugees from Europe who were seeking to flee. But could I just jump in one thing on that? Yeah, of course, yeah. It's such an important precursor to this because it also comes down to the President of the United States in that case. There was a press conference that FDR gave where he said something to the effect of it's a real tragedy, but there may be infiltrators and threats within this group of Jewish refugees.

There's a chance that Hitler's gotten to their families and is using them to spy on the United States. States, and so we have to be very careful. And almost immediately, after that press conference, the head of his Refuge Bureau, a guy by the name of Breckenridge Long, wrote an infamous memo where he laid out a way for the State Department to effectively keep Jews out of the country without it being the formal policy. And it's a chilling document because he's basically saying we can effectively delay and delay and resort to various administrative and bureaucratic devices and basically keep them from coming out. And so what I take from that is something that is kind of obvious.

This is technically called the presidential determination on refugees. It's the president who sets the number every year for his executive branch agencies to admit or deny. And when the president doesn't want a refugee to come in, no bureaucrat is going to stick their neck out. Because even if they're morally troubled or they feel compelled to do this, no one's going to do it if the president isn't telling you to do it. And there are a million ways that a bureaucracy can create trap doors to keep people from coming in. This has always been a kind of seesaw between the door opening or closing, but one constant is that it, ultimately everything comes down to what's in the president's mind and heart. Well, we're going to talk a little bit later about what's in our current president's mind and heart.

But before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about what inspired you to join USAID and to go to work in Iraq at the beginning of the Iraq War. Well, I come from a family of public servants. My dad was a state representative and then state senator in Illinois. And from a young age, we were taught that the easiest thing in life is to form an opinion about something. It's almost the laziest thing, that what really separates people is what you're willing to do with that opinion and where that principle drives you. And so I always knew from a young age that I wanted to live a life of some purpose. I wanted to engage with the problems of the world

and tried in my own small ways to make them better. I was just entering my senior year in college when 9-11 happened. My field of study was Middle Eastern history in Arabic, and I was already several years into my Arabic studies at that point. When I graduated, I went to Egypt on a Fulbright scholarship, and while I was there, I saw the crazy debate over whether to invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. And then the invasion of Iraq happened while I was there.

American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. I had very, very strong opinions about that invasion. I was furious about it. I saw it as a huge mistake. but coming from the family that I came from, that wasn't enough to just be angry about it. And I kept reading about how our government in Iraq did not have enough people that knew the language or that understood the region. And I felt a clear moral obligation

to try to help in the reconstruction of the country, that no matter where you stood on the invasion, nobody could object to trying to, to rebuild schools or to get clean water flowing from the faucets again, or to get the power back online. And so that's why I ended up going to work for USAID, which was the principal agency in charge of trying to rebuild the country.

I was in Baghdad for part of the year, and I was one of the only Americans that spoke the language. And so I became close with the Iraqis who were risking their lives to help us every day. These were not soldiers. These were people bringing fruits and vegetables into our compound for us to eat. They were lawyers and architects and doctors who were helping us figure out how to build our programs and how to help people.

After a year, my time got cut short, and I had a near-death experience triggered by PTSD. I had what's called a dissociative fugue state, and in the middle of the night, I think I must have thought I was still in Fallujah, and I sleepwalked, out of my hotel window. Wow. And I fell roughly 20 feet to concrete and broke my wrists and my jaw, my nose, I cracked my skull. And, you know, I got pushed back into the United States in a wheelchair.

And I basically sank into this deep depression where I felt like I had achieved nothing. I had nearly died for this stupid war and nothing I had risked my life to do had left any real meaningful mark. And that's when the civil war in Iraq broke out. And Iraqi colleagues of mine started to be assassinated for the sin of working for the U.S. government and working alongside me. And those who managed to escape with their lives started writing to me for help. I was 25 when all of this was happening. I didn't know the first thing about the refugee admissions program. I wasn't a lawyer. I didn't know any of this. I just knew that it was wrong what had happened to them. That they were basically indispensable to us.

In many cases, dragging our men out of firefights. They have lost limbs. They have been tortured. They've had family members abducted, raped, killed, all because they were on our side. and at that moment, our doors were closed to them. So I was pissed off, and I wrote an op-ed saying essentially help these people. And I naively thought that someone in power would just read it and hook my friends up with a visa. What ended up happening was that that op-ed started ricocheting throughout the diaspora of Iraqi refugees who worked for us. And they all started writing to me for help. And so within a day of writing that op-ed, my life was forever changed because I was just getting bombarded with desperate emails where whole families were putting their fate in my hands to somehow

get them to safety. So how did you even begin? The logistical challenge, the complexity, the bureaucratic hurdles. Like, where did you start? Microsoft Excel. The least sexy answer for all of that. But I had no plans to start a refugee organization. I had no plans to be an advocate. But there was so much flooding into my inbox that the only thing I could think to do was to just start organizing them into a list. And then once I started doing this, I had to do something with it. It wasn't just going to be some side hobby. And I'm like, well, I guess I got to go figure out who it is in Washington that I should deliver the list to. I'm curious about sort of, did you expect that there would be kind of political machinations involved in this? I mean, it sounds to me like you

approached it as a fairly apolitical thing. These were people who had aided an American war effort. and that we owed them a debt. But was that the response that you got in Washington? It was political from the jump. At the time that I started, this was still the Bush administration, and their official policy was that they had done this surge of troops. The surge had worked, and therefore there was no reason to admit these refugees because Iraq was safe again, and they should just go home. And so there was resistance from the war. the White House, but I knew when I met with these members of Congress, they could see clearly that this was both a moral obligation and a strategic imperative, that if helping the United

States becomes seen as a one-way ticket to the slaughterhouse, good luck trying to recruit people in the future to help us. So tell me about some of the people that you managed to help to bring to the United States? Well, the very first Iraqi on my list, his name's Yagdan. He worked alongside me at USAID, and he was in a pretty senior position helping us on our education program. So building schools, training teachers, getting desks and school supplies, all kinds of stuff. He got a death threat lobbed into his front. in the form of a severed dog's head with a note pinned to it saying that his head would be next

if he didn't run. And he went to USAID and begged them for help, and they essentially told him tough, you're on your own, we'll give you a couple weeks to sort this out, but if you don't come back, we're going to have to give your job to someone else. And so he fled and wrote to me, and that was the whole reason I started this. And he was also the first person on my list, with his wife that got a visa. And when I got the call from him in Damascus saying, they approved it, where should I go? I just blurted out, you're coming to Illinois,

you're coming to West Chicago, you're going to stay with my mom and dad. So I could go on for hours, but there's a certain stripe of American that gets really offended when I say this. But the people on my list, the vast majority of them, have done more in the service of our country

than any American has done. They have lost everything for our country. Nobody wants to become a refugee. Yeah. These Iraqis and Afghans that I had a role in helping out would give anything to be back in their hometowns. They're here because they got swept up in forces much larger than their control.

Just to jump ahead, I mean, I think that the world that you're describing, you know, from that era, even though it was such an enormous struggle to create a pathway for these folks to come to the United States. You know, obviously with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Muslim ban, the atmosphere changed so quickly. And then now here we are eight years later with Trump once again in office, and he has definitively slammed the door on refugees. One thing that I think about from 2017 were the big protests at the airports. Hundreds swarmed the arrivals terminal at SF vote today. In fact, so many people showed up.

The protests had to move outside. People showing up and protesting the Muslim ban. And sending back people with lawful visas. I just can't even imagine this is happening in our country. The response this time feels incredibly muted. What do you think it has changed? And what do you think that says about where we are as a country? I mean, I'm not the political analyst, but you had a framework where Trump had not won the popular vote.

in 2016. And I think that emboldened the opposition. It emboldened Democrats in office and probably gave a little room for Republicans who felt troubled by some of this to object. This time, you know, he won. He won the popular vote. He won the electoral vote. You can quibble about how big his mandate is or what people were voting for when they cast their vote for him, but no one can claim fraud or that this is some illegitimate president. I've like been getting all these questions. How do we stop this? How do we stand up to this? We are not at a moment where I could say to you with a straight face, oh yeah, call your senator up and tell them that you believe in opening our doors up to refugees. Write a letter to your member. And so where I'm at

is a kind of facing the world as it is, not how I wish it would be, and recognizing that I didn't get my values from the president, from any president. My personal positions and values, they can't be nullified by an executive order. And so what that means practically is that my own immediate family, I have two young children, I'm sure as hell going to raise them to understand that this is who we are as Americans is we're going to help those who need it. And so we have Afghan families in Los Angeles

that we regularly go and visit and my kids do toy drives amongst their friends to bring toys to these young children. And so I guess what I'm saying is that I'm viewing this more as a keeping a flame alive within my own family, recognizing that it can't be extinguished by this president, however much I disagree with him. But that also acknowledging that, you know what,

our doors are closed and they're going to remain closed. And there are going to be people that suffer, our image in the world will change. It's never been a guarantee that we're the shining city on the hill that people dream of coming to. I mean, I get emails from refugees all over the world every day asking for my help. And the day after the election, there were Afghans that had worked for us that were asking if I would help them or if I could help them. What did you tell them? I had to tell them that there was no chance they were coming to America at this point. That they needed to put their hopes in some other country.

And it brought me no joy to say that. But the worst thing you can do to somebody who's in peril is to give them some sense of false hope or to deceive them. I knew what was coming. And so I told them, don't even try to come. here because the incoming administration does not want you. So you've stepped back from the List Project, and it sounds to me like a lot of Americans, you know, really kind of reassessing what you can and should do in this moment. How are you thinking about

husbanding your energy and your and your resources and frankly your just kind of emotional strength to engage with the enormity of the difficulties out there? I'm not sure I'm going to have a satisfying answer for you. Chuck Schumer said something the other week. It was something like, we're not going to go existential on everything. We have to pick our battles wisely, and on those we'll lay ourselves down on the train tracks. It was something to that effect. There is so much change happening so quickly that the easiest path for all of us that are troubled by this is to just shut down, to pay less attention. But there's a point at which that just atrophies into disengagement.

I genuinely worry for myself that the things that are infuriating us now, we might not even remember in a few years of this. This is more of a survive this period, and do the grunt work when it's over to claw our way back to that value. The value that's on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Obama always loved to quote Martin Luther King in saying that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

And every time he said it, I would just wince a little bit. because it's the kind of quote that I think Americans gobble up because we can look at all of the kind of shameful parts of our history and we could say, yeah, well, okay, all right, we had slavery. All right, we had Jim Crow. But hey, it's getting better. That arc is always bending towards justice. I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on here, but it's BS.

The arc of the moral universe does not have any natural direction. It has no shape. It's not an arc. I don't think there is such a thing as the moral universe. But what I do know is that all of these values that we've been talking about in this conversation that we thought were enshrined, they were carved in stone.

It took a couple weeks for Americans to realize that they're written in sand. They can blow away in a heartbeat. And so, sorry, this is a knife fight. All of the gains that were made in the last generation, you pick your issue. What you see as progress, there is another group of people that see as a problem, as a mistake, and they are fighting like hell to bring the football back in the other direction. And right now, I'm like, people who support the notion of opening our doors to refugees,

we're going to get our asses kicked for at least the next four years. Well, I think if you look at history, it's likely to be much longer than that. I've been, you know, for much of the past year, working on a series about global migration. And just looking at American history, you know, we think of ourselves as this kind of statue of Liberty Nation. But the reality is that, you know, beginning in the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Act, right through to 1965 with, you know, laws that were in between, that was all. long period where migration to the United States was actually extremely tightly controlled, and it took a very long time for that to change. So it strikes me that, I mean, you talk about

arcs and you talk about the unfolding of history. I think it is this kind of pacifying fiction to believe that, you know, if we just kind of stay the course, things will get better. It's very kind of self-absolving, right, for us as citizens to think, well, you know, eventually we'll get to where we need to go. But in fact, I think history tells us that there have been moments of progress followed by profound, profound backlash. And what people do in those moments of backlash, I think, is in some ways the greatest proof of the timber of American character. I think that's absolutely right. We should have the humility in the face of that sweep of history to consider that what we grew up with was a blip. It was an anomaly. It is not the norm. All I can say right now is that I know

I will never be dissuaded that it was wrong to help Yagdan or to help all of these Iraqis or Afghans or Vietnamese or all the people we've been talking about that it was wrong to give them a chance at a new life here. But I'm not deluding myself into thinking that any of is going to get in under this administration. And the surest way to madness and total burnout is to imagine that you have more political power than you do in a given moment. Yeah. Well, Kirk, I will take away from this conversation a conviction to keep that flame alive.

And I'm grateful to you for spending some time with me to talk about. these questions. Thank you so much for having me. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaca, Phoebe, Feebillette, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, Femem Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Lacher, and Michelle Harris.

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