Soft Landing braces for GOP-led threats to its mission
Co-founder Mary Poole weighs in on Trump, the Montana Legislature and the organization's day-to-day victories.
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Since its founding in 2015, the non-profit organization Soft Landing has found creative and engaging ways to help hundreds of refugees and immigrants settle into life in Missoula.
One of the best, in my humble opinion, is through food. Among other projects, Soft Landing curates Supper Clubs, where a client with a passion for cooking can prepare and organize a multi-course meal held at a restaurant in town; members of the pubic can buy tickets and savor the flavors of cultures from all around the world.
I attended one such dinner shortly after November’s election. The chef du jour had prepared an amazing buffet meal, and ticket sales went towards helping them pay for their family members’ move to Missoula. Yet even though the mood was cheery and festive, I couldn’t help but feel an undercurrent of concern: would the incoming Trump Administration make it harder for families like the chef’s to settle in America?
To be clear, the bulk of Soft Landing’s clients are refugees, who have gone through an arduous and exhaustive process—and escaped from war, famine and other interconnected crises—to come to the United States legally, while the president-elect has focused his attention on undocumented immigrants. The first Trump Administration nonetheless offers indicators of the challenges legal refugees may face in his second term: admittance rates plummeted, and the President instituted a temporary ban on refugees entering the country at the beginning of his term.
In mid-December, I met up with Soft Landing’s co-founder and executive director, Mary Poole. A former arborist, Poole has a knack for separating the political signal from the noise and an open-minded attitude towards skeptics of the program. Read on as we discuss a range of topics, including the organization’s origins, its victories and the challenges she anticipates from both the incoming Trump Administration and the 2025 Montana Legislature.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Max: Can you share an example of a recent victory at Soft Landing?
Mary Poole: Syria, right? [The fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad] is really important to us. It was definitely the Syrian conflict that catalyzed all of this. There's definitely a lot of celebration happening. A lot of trepidation, too.
All the Syrian families are coming in to see us, to talk about their joy around the liberation of their country. We ask, will you go home? Unanimously they say, “Oh, our home is Missoula.” They say, my kids are in school, my life is good. Things are stable here, which is unfortunately probably not going be the case in Syria.
[In terms of other positive moments], we see babies in the office every day. There's going to be over 15 kids graduating from high school this year that we're working with. Some of those kids will go to UM. We work with about 20 young adults at UM right now.
We had our very first voters [in November]. Voting, participating in a democracy, is something that many people have never had the option to do. Or if they did have any agency, that was stripped from them in the process of conflict, war, persecution, whatever landed them here.
And they’re very diverse voters. It's such a misnomer to think that refugees and immigrants are one person.
Let’s take a step back. How did Soft Landing come to be?
We started in 2015. It was catalyzed in the middle of the night when I was breastfeeding a child and having a friend send the picture of Alan Kurdi, who was a 2-year-old boy that lost his life crossing the Mediterranean. A lot of people in Missoula were really interested in knowing what more we could do to help.
At that time, I was an arborist for the city. I was climbing a tree with a chainsaw. I didn't know what a non-profit was. I'd never been a volunteer anywhere. I grew up on a farm. I didn't have a frame of reference at all. I literally had to Google, “What is a refugee?”
What we found out pretty quickly was that to welcome any refugees to your community, you need the presence of a resettlement agency.
Luckily we were able to get the ear of the International Rescue Committee. They have an office here in Missoula now. It was one week shy of a year after the photo [of Kurdi] came out that the first family came to Missoula from Congo.
That sounds very fast!
It was fast and crazy. I had this incredible community. In our first public meeting, 300 people signed up to volunteer. In our first public event, a thousand people showed up in the streets of Missoula. It was this moving freight train that I was hanging onto for dear life.
That was happening alongside community members that had real questions and real concerns and didn't want to see it happen.
Sometimes that showed up in wonderful conversation with people that were willing to sit down and have coffee with me. Sometimes that showed up as threats and phone calls in the middle of the night.
What would be an example of a good-faith argument against the program?
There is an additional weight added to our public services and our school system and all of those things. Now, do those things come with amazing opportunity for partnerships and additional funding and all these things? Yeah. Eventually. But it's not easy. It's okay that people don't know how this works.
All conversation is worth it. If you have questions, you should ask them.
Everyone has the right to their own assumptions. I came from ground zero on this; I don't expect anyone else to not be coming from ground zero.
I think what is challenging in our state is that very few people have experiences with refugees and immigrants. And so they're piggybacking off of the media or what they hear, instead of having true relationships.
How did the first Trump Administration impact your work?
What Trump meant for our nation and what Trump meant for us is probably very different.
Each location has these very specific elements that affect it in different ways. So what happened in Missoula was very different from [what happened to] a family trying to cross into Texas.
We primarily welcome refugees. That pathway was paused, but not ended. There was a 90-day pause right off the bat.
That messes with the resettlement system in a lot of ways. The system itself has all of these very time-determinate checks. For example, a medical screening lasts for six months and a security check lasts for three months. So [everything] has to be matched up before that perfect moment when a family's ready to come. They buy plane tickets and sell all their stuff. And when that perfect moment is disrupted, they go to the back of the line because then they have to do all those things again.
A lot of resettlement offices nationwide did have to shut down during [the Trump Administration]. But in Missoula, since our capacity to welcome folks is 100 to 125 people a year, they were basically able to maintain those numbers through the first three years of Trump's presidency. The last year, not so much, because the numbers that he set got so low. [In 2020, the Trump Administration admitted 15,000 refugees; Biden subsequently raised the number to an annual high of 125,000.]
When Biden got into office, I think he wanted to be a country that was welcoming to refugees. But even 125,000 people is such a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of people seeking safety in the world.
Is there anything in particular you're bracing for with the second Trump Administration?
I don't think there'll be surprises if he enforces a ban or a pause in refugee admissions.
I think there's a couple added elements [at the state level]. We launched in the last year of Obama's presidency. It was serendipitous timing. Missoula was the only place [in Montana] with a resettlement agency. People contacted me from every other major city in Montana saying, “How do we do what you did? We want to welcome refugees into our communities.” And really, that wasn't able to happen during the Trump presidency. Resettlement agencies were shutting down offices, not opening up new offices.
That will be very different for our state this time around. There's just a much broader effort across the state now. During the last four years, we've had a new resettlement agency open in Billings. We've had quite a few families come to Montana through [Biden’s] humanitarian parole system: Ukrainians, Afghans, Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Hondurans. We've had more people come to Montana after processing asylum cases at the border. We have housing booms all around Montana that are bringing workers.
Are there strategies that the state Legislature can take to disrupt refugee resettlement?
Refugee resettlement is a federal program, right? The state can either participate in that program like our state does, by having a state refugee coordinator and [receiving] pass-through funds. Our state doesn't contribute any funding for refugees, specifically.
So they can opt in or out of [federal funding]. But it doesn't mean resettlement goes away. It's just managed differently.
On top of that, we hear about coming down the pipeline. There was an [attempted] special session that tried to make undocumented folks that are in Montana illegal.
It's really hard to wrap my brain around one; being in our country undocumented is already against the law.
Our legislature doesn't seem to shy away from doing things that end up in courts. It's just posturing and messaging. We want our police officers to be putting their resources towards public safety, not utilizing valuable resources for other things.
[There was another proposal last spring] that targets non-profits that work with immigrants, basically. That's something that I really want to know more about, and that a lot of the other groups are worried about.
That's something also we're kind of seeing nationally with this bill that just passed the [US House], and they're just pausing it until Trump gets into office. It basically says that non-profit status can be stripped by our federal government from any non-profit that is [allegedly] supporting terrorism; like, if you have anything to say about Palestine, if you have anything to say about climate, if you work with immigrants.
It's very nebulous and very scary. How is that gonna be used?
Is there anything you think is crucial for someone to know about Soft Landing and your work that we haven't touched on?
We're talking about people that who been through incredible situations, who have worked so hard and continue to work really hard to build a home here; to have children that get to go to school, to participate in recreational activities, to go hiking and go to the lake in the summer. To have a life.
Folks are not here to disrupt our way of life. They’re not.
I want to be very clear that all questions are good questions. That's not the problem. The problem is the language used and the rhetoric [that spiked during election season]. That's like the hardest part for me.
People are really frightened. Refugees in Missoula are among the less vulnerable people to anything Trump is gonna do. And yet they come to our office and they say, “Is there anything I can do to make my life more secure here?”
Do we need to get on top of some shit in our country and at our border? Yes. I would love to see a really productive conversation around our southern border that would create solutions that were humane for people and solve a problem. We are smart, we are capable.
We even saw, in the election here, our Democratic candidates using immigrants in their ads, and not in a positive light.
Luckily these people are very perseverant and they've built incredible community and they have so much love and support here.