Sitting on a church pew in Tucson, Arizona, Mary Kaech made a decision. It was 2003, and she was just a student at the University of Arizona when, in the middle of the service, a woman stood to make an announcement. She was fostering a “lost boy” from Sudan. His family had been killed in a civil war there. This 60-something-year-old woman in the congregation, divorced and living alone in a trailer, had taken him in. Mary was stunned by her generosity.
“When I grow up,” she thought, “I want to be just like her.”
Over a decade later, around 2015, Mary and her husband, Mark, were ready to start their family. They tried to get pregnant and pursued refugee foster licensing at the same time. They got their license and found out they were pregnant “simultaneously,” Mark says.
After their daughter, Rose, was born in 2016, the couple had so many reasons to say no to foster placements. They were too tired. The timing was bad. Rose was already too much to handle. But when Rose was just 11 months old, the Catholic Community Services office in Phoenix called about a 17-year-old girl from Congo named Angelique.
“We signed up for this,” Mark told Mary. “We have to say yes at some point.”
A brief history of refugees in America
Over 123 million people were “forcibly displaced” around the world by the beginning of this year, according to the United Nations. Among them, about 50 million children. Many of those children are still part of intact families, but many (likely millions) are not.
Historically, the United States has prioritized the most vulnerable refugees, like orphaned children, for resettlement. In 2024, it resettled 105,500 — the most of any country in the world. Those who make it to the United States disproportionately end up settling in the heartland and the West. As of 2023, Nebraska hosted the most per capita, while North Dakota, Idaho, South Dakota, Arizona, Washington and Utah all ranked among the top 11.
But how many settle here each year tends to fluctuate, since the number of refugees allowed into the country is determined by the Refugee Act of 1980, which gives the president broad authority to cap refugee admissions. From an all-time high of 207,000 refugees admitted by President Jimmy Carter following the law’s passage, the numbers fell during the ’80s, rose during the ’90s, then stayed relatively stable (minus a brief drop following September 11, 2001) through the George Bush and Barack Obama years.
As part of his America First position — emphasizing domestic priorities over global humanitarian obligations — those numbers fell precipitously during President Donald Trump’s first term; in 2018, the U.S. admitted its fewest refugees since before the Refugee Act of 1980’s passage. By 2020, the numbers had reached an all-time low (fueled in significant part by the Covid-19 pandemic). They rebounded under President Joe Biden, returning to their early-aughts average, before Trump essentially paused all refugee admissions via an executive order on the very first day of his second term, citing national security.
While formal international adoptions have withered, refugee foster parents continue to meet an often unseen need to house some of the world’s most vulnerable kids.
That ban remains mostly in place as challenges filter through the courts, and there are essentially no new refugees currently entering the country. That could impact hundreds of thousands of people around the world, including kids like Angelique. Her family was killed amid civil war in Congo when she was about 13, and she fled across the border to Uganda, where she’d attached herself to a family in a refugee camp who eventually left. She did that again and again until, finally, she left herself. “She just kind of earned her keep over and over,” Mary says, “and just did whatever anyone wanted her to do so that she could eat and survive.”
The White House frames its new policy as a necessary bulwark against an overabundance of migrants, including refugees. “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans,” reads the official announcement. It’s one part of the Trump administration’s broader America First agenda, seeking to recalibrate the government’s priorities — with potentially severe consequences.
Foster care for kids like Angelique looks a lot like adoption; they live with a family, sometimes for years, that’s supposed to provide a stable bridge into adulthood — although the arrangement is ultimately temporary. Adopting international and refugee children in the U.S., meanwhile, is controversial and has been declining for years.
Over 22,000 internationally adopted children entered the U.S. in 2004, but the number has been falling across U.S. adoption agencies since then, in part because of declining global adoption rates, increased domestic adoption, stricter international adoption regulations and an increased awareness of child welfare issues. Some studies also show that even if international adoptions are by-the-book and help save a child from unstable and dangerous home countries, the practice can still be detrimental to a child’s development.
“To be the answer to a mom’s prayer downstream — why wouldn’t I do that?”
Refugee children can’t usually be formally adopted. If their birth parents are dead, documentation is required to prove it, which is rare in war-torn countries. And if a child’s parents are alive, having them relinquish parental rights from across the world can be coercive and unethical. Many refugee kids, therefore, end up with foster parents.
They arrive either as unaccompanied minors crossing the border — a population that surged from 13,625 in 2012 to an all-time high of 128,904 in 2022 — or through the United Nations’ refugee resettlement programs, as Angelique did. While formal international adoptions have withered, and refugee resettlement is at a standstill because of the federal government, refugee foster parents continue to meet an often-unseen need to house some of the world’s most vulnerable kids. To date, there isn’t much research on the long-term outcomes of placing these kids with foster families in the U.S. But there are stories.
Success stories
In Utah, a family in Saratoga Springs has fostered five kids over eight years, from four different continents. One boy, from Afghanistan, came over during his country’s humanitarian crisis. He came alone, and was later able to help his family get out, too. Another, from Guatemala, ended up attending Utah State University, getting married and settling down in his new home state. Every time Kyle Mortensen, who runs the refugee foster care program at Catholic Community Services of Utah, called, saying that a child needed a home, they opened their door.
When a now-21-year-old girl with a disability moved in, the family committed to providing care for the rest of her life, even after she’d aged out of the program — which she did in June. Yet she’s still at home in Saratoga Springs. “They are not receiving any financial benefit to have this kid in their life,” Mortensen says. “But this kid is in their life.” He didn’t reveal identifying information about the family, citing privacy concerns. But he knows them well enough to know this much: They’re exemplary of how one family can make a huge difference.
Kerri Evans has heard similar stories over and over. As a professor in the department of social work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has studied refugee foster care, she has conducted “site monitoring visits” where she’s heard testimonials about how beneficial refugee foster programs can be, for both foster parents and foster children. “While adoption may not be possible, a long-term relationship surely is,” she says.
Foster care is relatively rare. Most refugee children (nearly 99 percent) end up living with “community sponsors” — often aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings who agree to provide care. The remaining 1.1 percent end up in foster care. Of those, early research offers reason for optimism.
Each additional month in foster care increases the chances of employment by 3.2 percent, and also increases the level of educational attainment. In other words, the longer kids stay in refugee foster care, the more likely they are to make positive contributions to their new communities, according to studies published by Evans and her colleagues. Additionally, nearly 97 percent of refugee kids who’d been placed with foster parents between three and 15 months ago reported “a positive outlook for the future.” And more than a quarter had at least intermediate English skills.
“We know lots,” Evans says, “and the outcomes are quite promising. … I think this is part of the solution for kids.”
Nearly 97 percent of refugee kids placed with foster parents reported “a positive outlook for the future.”
But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. “Refugee fostering is often the meeting of quite different worlds,” says Paul Scheibelhofer, a researcher at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who has studied refugee migrant children. “People with very different biographies and sometimes quite different cultural understandings about how things should be done find themselves in a tremendously intimate situation.”
His research shows that the families who fare the worst tend to be those who impose strict and rigid expectations, which can lead to a cascade of conflict. There needs to be room for nuance and experimentation, where relationships can grow naturally. Once that happens, he seconds Evans: Whether in Europe, the United States or elsewhere, fostering refugee kids can benefit everyone involved.
The happiest refugee foster families, he adds, tend to be those in which parents and kids use the freedom to negotiate a new, less defined form of family to meet their needs and wishes. Rather than conform to expectations about what a family “should” be, folks in this situation can instead work toward the type of family they really want. “I encountered relationships that sparkled with life, were rooted in deep emotional closeness and sincere empathy,” Scheibelhofer says. “These relationships ‘felt like family’ in the best sense of the word.”
Those kinds of relationships also tend to reduce stress and anxiety for kids who need it after past struggles, in part by providing access to resources the kids have never had before. “It is thus no wonder,” Scheibelhofer adds, “that studies have shown that refugees in foster (care) often have better living situations than other young refugees.”
And even though it’s relatively rare to foster a refugee child, right now, there’s a queue for kids looking for safe homes. “It’s been a nightmare, honestly,” Mortensen, from Catholic Community Services of Utah, says. “The last several months of new policies coming out, not knowing how the program is going to be affected.” There are more kids in need than volunteers to foster, and he understands that bringing a child into your home and family dynamics is “a huge ask.”
A second chance
It wasn’t easy at first, given the language barrier, but Angelique learned English quickly and started opening up when given the chance. Mark began keeping track of her history in a notebook. “That’s kind of how we learned her story,” he says.
When she aged out of the program at 19 and had to move out as mandated by the local Catholic Community Services branch, the family still invited her to dinner at least weekly. She lived about 10 minutes away, still going to school and working evenings at a grocery store. Sometimes, many times, she stayed the night with them. When Angelique turned 20, Mary and Mark offered to adopt her. It was more ceremonial by then; as a legal adult, she didn’t need formal guardians. But she accepted anyway.
The process was finalized December 1, 2020. Soon, Catholic Community Services called again. This time, they had a 17-year-old boy from Afghanistan who needed a home. His name was Ali, and they later learned that his mother had him smuggled out of his home country to avoid the Taliban’s violence.
He lived in an Indonesian orphanage before coming to the U.S., where he’d been in and out of multiple foster homes before ending up with them. When he first told Mary and Mark his story, Mary immediately thought of the biblical Moses, whose mother placed him in a basket and sent him up the Nile, hoping someone would find him and care for him. She loves that story. “To be the answer to his mom’s prayer downstream,” Mary says, “why wouldn’t I do that?”
Ali practices Islam, which was an adjustment for the Kaechs. They learned to check in with him during Ramadan. To celebrate Eid. And sometimes he joined them for church, too, just because he’s a curious person.
Mary and Mark are both Anglican, and they believe God commands them to love their neighbors; to practice hospitality; to care for the orphan and the widow, wherever they’re from.
“If you believe the Bible and you see what’s happening,” Mary says, “then this is the only option.” Hence why they welcomed Ali, who has since enrolled in college studying public policy, and Angelique, who has given Mary and Mark, both 42, three grandchildren. They couldn’t formally adopt Ali, because his mother is still alive in Afghanistan. But they didn’t really need to. He’s family.
One night, while Mary and Mark were watching TV in the living room, Ali poked his head in. “Can I call you Mama and Papa?” he asked. “Yes,” they answered. And so he did.
This story appears in the October 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.