The State Department's Refugee Bureau
How the Department of State became the lead U.S. agency for refugee assistance abroad.
Origins
The Department of State has worked on refugee issues since the postwar years. As the Indochinese crisis grew in the late 1970s, the Department set up a dedicated bureau for refugee programs, and the Refugee Act of 1980 created a U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs.
Population, Refugees, and Migration
In the 1990s the bureau took its current name, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, known as PRM. It funds humanitarian aid through international organizations such as the UN refugee agency and manages the overseas side of refugee resettlement.
Former refugees inside the bureau
Some PRM staff were once refugees themselves. Hoa Tran, who fled Vietnam at seven, led the bureau's Asia team. A 2011 bureau report noted that many resettled refugees work at the Department, including eleven employees who had entered the United States as refugee children. That year the bureau also published a series of essays by former refugees working at State, including Martina Strong, Anya Brunson, and Andy Pham.