On a weekday at the world’s largest refugee camp, dozens of women and men form two surging queues, pushing to reach the front of the line to get their official aid registration cards processed.
The crowd is made of refugees from neighbouring Myanmar’s persecuted Muslim minority Rohingya community, recently arrived at the sprawling complex housing more than a million people in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
“They are all Rohingya who have arrived here in the last month. They need more support,” said Abu Osman, a program manager at an NGO called Agrajattra, which provides vaccinations and maternal, mental and community health services to thousands in the camp.
“But now the support has stopped, so this is very challenging.”
He is speaking about the recent executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump, signed the day he took office for his second term, that abruptly froze most U.S. foreign aid for 90 days.
The decision has caused turmoil and confusion in the global humanitarian sector, and Cox’s Bazar camps, which has been entrenched since August 2017 when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fled across the border to escape a brutal military crackdown in their home country, Myanmar.
The United Nations has called the ruling military junta’s persecution of the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” against the “most persecuted minority in the world.”
While a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from withholding payments for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts underway, it’s far from certain what will happen next.
But in the Rohingya refugee camps, an already dire situation has worsened, with many health workers and medications suddenly gone.
‘All activities suddenly stopped’
Washington’s foreign aid cuts have put the squeeze on some crucial aid operations in the Rohingya camps, particularly among smaller NGOs that mainly specialize in community health programs and door-to-door visits to try to identify and stave off illness.
While emergency food distribution is exempt from the funding pause and other health services such as vaccination clinics and neo-natal care remain intact, the freeze has also caused a disruption in sanitation and waste management measures across the massive camp complex.
“Our organization’s program is fully shut down and 120 staff members [lost their jobs],” Osman told CBC News, before the Supreme Court ruling was released.
“All activity suddenly stopped, and [we can no longer provide] ambulances or our regular services,” he said, adding that some 24,000 refugees in the camp depended on those services.
Beyond Wednesday’s ruling, which only applied to funding work that had already been completed and didn’t specify a timeline for the release of that money, there is also a flurry of other lawsuits contesting the president’s dismantling of USAID, with more rulings expected in the coming weeks.
The U.S. has long been the largest donor to the heavily-aid dependent Rohingya humanitarian crisis, contributing 55 per cent of all the foreign funding earmarked for the refugee community last year – a total of $301 million US.
Bangladesh as a whole received more than $450 million US last year of U.S. foreign assistance, according to government data, the second highest total in the region, after Afghanistan.
“Funding cuts have already disrupted key services, including but not limited to health, water and sanitation, protection, education, and livelihoods, increasing vulnerabilities and protection risks,” wrote Syed Md. Tafhim, spokesperson for the ISCG, the co-ordinating body for the many humanitarian agencies helping Rohingya refugees at Cox’s Bazar, in an emailed response to a question from CBC News.
He added that different groups were scrambling to fill the “urgent gaps” that the funding freeze created, by moving available resources around.
As U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze most foreign aid for 90 days reverberates around the world, CBC’s Salimah Shijvi looks at how those cuts are making life even harder for persecuted Rohingya refugees inside Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh — the world’s largest refugee camp.
‘Where will I give birth?’
For Roshida, eight months pregnant and a refugee who’s been living at one of the Cox’s Bazar camps for more than seven years, it’s been an anxiety-filled few weeks.
“I’m worried. If the service is no longer, where will I give birth?” said Roshida, who only goes by one name, as she held her one-year old toddler in her cramped tent, which is surrounded by barbed wire to keep the refugees in.
She said social workers and hospital staff used to visit her regularly to check on her health and were supposed to provide an ambulance ride when she went into labour, but since late January, they haven’t shown up.
“They used to provide proper care, medicine, and services. Now they don’t come,” the 22-year old told CBC News.
Osman said the impact of his program being shuttered has already been felt in a few short weeks. Before the closure, nearly all — 95 per cent — of pregnant women in the camps could make it to a hospital bed with the help of his social workers.
It’s now down to between 40 and 50 per cent, he said.
Many other NGO directors were reluctant to speak about the funding freeze, in the hopes that staying quiet would make a difference while U.S. authorities worked on reevaluating their foreign aid choices.
Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), on a recent visit to Cox’s Bazar, also alluded to the prevalent fear of further cuts.
“If donor support decreases dramatically — which may happen — the huge work done by the Bangladesh government, aid agencies and refugees will be impacted, putting thousands at risk of hunger, disease and insecurity,” Grandi wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
Fear, uncertainty in camps
Muhammad Khan, 13 and suffering from a rare degenerative nerve disorder that causes muscle weakness which means he can no longer walk, is also a victim of the funding freeze, after the organization that handled his treatment had to close.
“All of these issues are increasing my stress levels,” said his mother Yasmin, who has seven other children.
Muhammad needs to take his pills to be able to be slightly more mobile, his mother said, but for at least 10 days after the Trump executive order was signed, he received no treatment and was bed-ridden. His disease has no cure.
Somehow, the NGO that was administering his treatment was able to find funds from elsewhere, because of the severity of his condition, to restart his care — for now.
Yasmin is still concerned that the nurses taking care of her second eldest son will once again vanish.
That fear permeates the refugee camps, where many aid workers are trying to guess what might happen next.
“There was the initial shock and now we’re trying to absorb the shock,” said Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner, who heads the government agency in charge of handling Rohingya refugees.
He said the entire aid community was “waiting for good news” from the U.S., hoping that the funding freeze would be reversed, but that the problem runs deeper than just one country.
Support for Rohingya dropping
Overall funding from foreign donors earmarked for the Rohingya, who are stateless and vulnerable, keeps dropping every year, with the current funding shortfall hovering around 35 per cent.
The World Food program, which is funded entirely by voluntary donations, revealed on Thursday that it was forced to cut its food rations for the Rohingya in Bangladesh in half after attempts to raise more funds were unsuccessful. The agency was unable to cover a funding shortfall to keep the full rations in place.
The world is distracted by other crises that make the headlines, according to Rahman, such as the war in Ukraine or the conflict in Gaza.
The United Kingdom, like the U.S, also recently announced it was pulling back from foreign humanitarian aid, with plans to cut the country’s foreign aid budget by 40 percent to prioritize defence spending.
“The United States has been instrumental in this critical area of [helping the Rohingya]” Rahman said.
“Hopefully countries like the U.S.A. and others … will not forget the Rohingya crisis,” he added ruefully.
Rahman said, even as aid workers try to move funding around to do the best they can with the limited resources available, ultimately, “the actual victims are the Rohingya patients.”
