Closing Time? Denver Refugees Enjoy Annual Thanksgiving Dinner, but It Could be the Last.

For more the two decades, the Denver-based African Community Center (ACC) has hosted a “First” Thanksgiving to introduce refugees and other immigrants to the holiday and life in the United States, but the nonprofit believes it has hosted the annual feast for the last time as the Trump administration freezes resettlement and cuts government aid programs.

“We’re waiting to hear what is going to happen,” Ron Buzard, the managing director of ACC, said during the most recent First Thanksgiving on Friday, November 21. “All of the resettlement agencies are in the same mode right now, just saying, ‘Try and stay positive and looking at refocusing our resources on those families that are here, and doing a good job of that.”

On September 30, the Trump administration announced it would move resettlement from a State Department process to the Department of Health and Human Services for a more efficient use of tax dollars. Buzard said it creates uncertainty about what that means for the federal funding ACC and other resettlement agencies get to integrate refugees, saying “in this transition, we don’t really know what’s going to be happening this time next year.”

First Thanksgivings have always been a family event, not just for refugees but all immigrants, including recently arrived migrants, naturalized citizens and people seeking asylum cases in the U.S. Every year, the ACC sets out dishes full of rice, pasta, dumplings, sambusas, pies and, of course, turkey. Signs over the shoulders of the smiling volunteers serving food inform guests where the dishes originated, from Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine to Ethiopia and Venezuela, among others.

The event went on as always last Friday, but organizers knew it might be the last First Thanksgiving. Since 2001, ACC has resettled more than 14,000 refugees into Denver and Aurora, but, according to Buzard, the White House has instituted a near-complete freeze on new admissions, and the number of refugees that ACC has resettled into Colorado this year is “dozens, instead of hundreds.” That includes refugees who were admitted before President Donald Trump returned to office in January.

Chelsea Primak, an ACC refugee resettlement expert and spokesperson, said the organization will have federal funding to last until next October, but beyond that is a mystery.

“If we go away, the needs of the community will be unmet, and it’s just really sad,” Primak said. “We know our state and our nation is stronger because of the immigrants we welcome to it.”

The ripple effect of Trump’s policies and the federal government’s aggressive immigration enforcement in 2025 was felt in other ways during Friday’s First Thanksgiving, too.

This year’s venue, the Z New Summit Conference and Event Center in Aurora, was significantly smaller than the Assumption of the Theotokos Cathedral in Glendale last year. Nearly 1,000 people showed up to last year’s dinner, which had its own layer of tension after Trump was elected — but this year the spector was even more apparent, with just a couple of hundred visitors. Still, the ACC and attendees managed to paint a warm, happy scene with kids dancing, friends hugging and families laughing.

“This year means a lot more in terms of the welcoming component,” Chelsea Primak, a refugee resettlement expert and spokesperson for ACC, told Westword. “We want people to feel welcomed now more than ever. We want people to realize that Colorado is a welcoming state.”

Last year, ACC hosted its first Thanksgiving only a couple of weeks after Trump won his reelection, but about six weeks before he had taken office. This year, the Trump administration has already deported more than half a million immigrants, according to federal numbers, and has another 60,000 detained and awaiting removal. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has created a fearful environment for immigrants across the country as masked agents arrest individuals and raid homes, with Latino advocacy groups saying Colorado has had some of the largest ICE raids this year.

Much fewer immigrants were willing to talk to Westword this time around compared to last year, and even fewer were willing to share their political opinions.

Makelele Munyonge was one of the few willing to speak. He was a fisherman in the Democratic Republic of the Congo before violence forced him to come to Denver in November 2021. He gave a blunt explanation about why he didn’t want to say what he thinks of Trump’s strangle on the process that brought him here.

“I am not into politics because this is a country in political recession,” he said. “This is not a country that has laws that can protect people, but a president that wants to be able to say where the government is going. That’s why I can’t be involved in politics.”

Munyonge would rather be a fisherman in the Congo again if it weren’t for the violence in his home country.

“Refugee” is a federal designation for permission to come to the U.S. because they’re fleeing war or disaster, and refugee status is only granted to people who apply from it from abroad. Refugees have more protections than asylum-seekers or migrants, which refer to immigrants who come into the U.S. without finalized permission for various reasons. Some immigrants have temporary protections, like humanitarian parole for asylum seekers whose case is going through the system, or temporary protected status for people fleeing a sudden disaster.

Refugee status comes with permanent protections, but it’s much harder to attain. The U.S. brings in refugees through a process called resettlement, where the federal government distributes a certain number of refugees across the states based on their populations. The federal government partners with designated resettlement agencies, often nonprofits, that are given federal funds to help refugees integrate into society during the five years they need to stay in the U.S. to be eligible for citizenship. ACC is one of three refugee resettlement agencies in Colorado, alongside the local chapter of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Lutheran Family Services.

Applying for refugee status requires extensive vetting that takes years and leaves people behind in refugee camps as they wait. According to the IRC, 122 million people worldwide are currently fleeing conflict or disaster.

The federal government sets a quota every year for how many refugees the country can take in, and the federal government decides which nationals get access to the U.S. as refugees; this year, Trump has limited eligibility to just 7,500 White Afrikaners from South Africa. Usually, even fewer refugees are admitted than what the ceiling allows. Flights for new refugees arriving in the U.S. stopped in February in response to a Trump executive order he signed on his first day in office, and only a few have been let through since. Primak said that the freeze in resettlement has severed refugee families in Denver from any hope of reuniting with distant loved ones, and ACC is “seeing a huge impact on mental health.”

“A lot of them have become depressed, even suicidal. If they’re not able to go back there and see their families,” Primak said. “Especially with the Afghan men who came during the fall of Kabul. They came and have been waiting for their families to join them four years, and there’s no hope.”

Buzard described the U.S. refugee system as “very exclusive right now. It’s excluded all other countries except for the Afrikaners coming.”

“Even other regions of Africa, where refugees have been waiting for years, decades,” Buzard explained. “All of that is not happening right now. We’re really in uncharted waters right now.”

Buzard said that ACC has never gone through anything like this, “not even during the first Trump term.” The all-time low for refugee admissions took place in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and only about 10,000 refugees arrived each of those years. While the first year was during Trump’s term, the second was the first year of former President Joe Biden’s one term. However, before Biden left office, he set a ceiling of 125,000 refugees and admitted more than 100,000. On Monday, Trump issued a memo saying he would review and re-vet nearly 200,000 refugees admitted during the Biden administration.

“Even after 9/11, we still welcomed twenty-plus thousand the year after,” Primak said. “So to put the number to 7,500 is just ridiculous.”

With no new refugees coming into the country, ACC has been focusing its energy on the families here. Buzard adds that if anyone wants to help ACC or other resettlement agencies, they can volunteer.

“There’s still a lot of work going on. There’s still a need for that community support,” Buzard said. “What the refugee resettlement agencies are doing right now can’t be done by staff alone. It really is a community effort.”