A 90-day freeze on foreign assistance programs announced by U.S. President Donald Trump has led to cuts in services to refugees from war-torn Myanmar, including the shutdown of hospital care in camps in Thailand where more than 100,000 are living, activists and Thai officials said Wednesday.
About 106,000 long-term refugees live in nine camps along Thailand’s western border with Myanmar, according to the Border Consortium, which coordinates and supplies food, shelter and other support to most of them. The consortium’s mid-year report last year said the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration was its largest donor, contributing 69% of its funding.
Around 80% of the camps’ residents are from the Karen ethnic minority, whose homeland in eastern Myanmar in embroiled in combat. The Karen have been battling for greater autonomy from Myanmar’s central government for more than seven decades. Intermittent fighting escalated sharply after Myanmar’s army seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, causing more to flee across the border.
Karen News, an online news site serving the Karen community, reported Wednesday that several charity groups and NGOs providing assistance for refugees from Myanmar suspended operations after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio last Friday issued an order halting nearly all existing and new foreign aid.
On Tuesday, Rubio agreed to at least temporarily keep spending money on humanitarian programs that provide life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance, but it was not immediately clear which programs if any affecting refugees from Myanmar would be included.
“All organizations relying on U.S. humanitarian assistance in the region have been affected. Some operations providing education, health care, and support for war-displaced communities have now been suspended,” Karen News cited an unidentified worker at an NGO based in Mae Sot, in Thailand’s Tak province, as saying.
It said the groups included the New York-headquartered International Rescue Committee, or IRC, which provide hospital services at the border camps, had suspended their operations on Monday. IRC did not immediately comment on the situation.
Thai officials said they were aware of the crisis and would ensure that seriously ill patients in the camps would be cared for in provincial Thai hospitals.
Chucheep Pongchai, the governor of Tak province, where three of the refugee camps are located, said 14 patients in a critical condition would be transferred to the province’s Tha Song Yang hospital.
Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the government’s National Health Security Office has set aside the budget to assist those foreigners who cannot survive on their own.
“No matter how U.S. policy has changed, we won’t let anyone die in our land as long as we can support them,” he said.
The Jesuit Refugee Service, a charity organization registered in Italy, said that as of Saturday it had suspended its Urban Refugee Program, which serves refugees outside the camps, including in the Thai capital Bangkok.
“This is due to the suspension of funding from our main donor, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration,” the Jesuit Refugee Service said on its Facebook page. It said it could neither make nor take referrals or register new clients, and services to existing clients were also suspended.