At a time when the global count of forcibly displaced persons has swelled to an estimated 117 million — and the programs meant to protect the most vulnerable among them are being shuttered — a panel of faith advocates, human rights experts, and survivors gathered to demand the world not look away. The discussion, “Fleeing for Faith: Protecting Freedom of Belief for People on the Move,” laid bare a deepening crisis at the intersection of religious persecution and forced migration.

Moderated by Naomi Steinberg, Vice President for U.S. Policy and Advocacy at HIAS (the International Jewish Humanitarian Refugee Organization), the panel brought together Katherine Marshall of Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center, Nazila Gana, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and investigative journalist and activist Nuri Kino, founder of A Demand for Action.

A Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

The panel opened by confronting a stark paradox: while the number of people on the move because of religious persecution continues to climb — in China, Iran, Myanmar, Nigeria, and beyond — the mechanisms for protecting them are rapidly contracting. The abrupt halt to the United States refugee resettlement program, with no carveout for religious minorities, was cited as a particularly alarming reversal. “Very few are in third-country resettlement,” Marshall noted, stressing that the vast majority of displaced persons are either internally displaced within their own countries or sheltering in neighboring nations “barely able to support them.”

Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center, called for renewed “prophetic voices” — both moral and practical — to cut through the political headwinds. “We know migration is beneficial in the long term,” she said, citing research suggesting 83 percent of citizens ultimately benefit from it. “And yet it is hard to manage in the short term. This is where we desperately need both the moral but also the practical voices of our religious leaders.”

The Forgotten Dimension: Spiritual Needs in the Camps

UN Special Rapporteur Nazila Gana broadened the conversation in a significant way. In a report delivered to the UN General Assembly last October, she expanded the definition of “people on the move” to include migrant workers and their families — drawing attention to the ways in which freedom of religion or belief is systematically neglected across every form of displacement, voluntary or not.

“We prioritize shelter, food, education, health — and those are hugely important,” Gana acknowledged. “But why do we devalue the importance of freedom of religion or belief to someone who has been removed from their context, from their network, from their community, from what has given them over time solace?” With resettlement averaging a decade for many displaced persons, and sometimes far longer, she argued that religious freedom is not a luxury — it is a psychological and spiritual lifeline.

One Boy’s Story: Matias of Nineveh

It was Nuri Kino — herself a refugee who fled to Germany at age five and later grew up in Sweden — who brought the crisis into sharp, agonizing focus. Dressed in black “for all the children who at this very moment are forced to flee to survive,” Kino recounted the case of Matias, a 19-year-old Iraqi Christian boy whose family escaped Nineveh as ISIS swept through their city in 2015.

Ten years after arriving in Sweden, Matias was one of the top students at his high school, beloved by teachers and classmates alike, aiming to become a doctor. On December 14, 2025, Swedish police detained him at school and placed him in a deportation center — ordered to return to a country where, Kino noted, “Christians are considered second-class citizens” with no equal rights under the constitution.

The case laid bare a troubling double standard: new EU asylum guidelines, she said, can grant protection to those with “links to ISIS” in the absence of individual evidence of war crimes — while simultaneously issuing deportation orders for Christian asylum seekers from Iraq and Syria on the grounds that persecution there “no longer exists.” Kino’s op-ed in Newsweek detailing the case was published the day of the panel.

Calls to Action: What Can Be Done

The panel closed with urgent, concrete recommendations. Moderator Steinberg led with a direct appeal to attendees heading to Capitol Hill: restart the Lautenberg Amendment program, which has historically provided a pathway for persecuted religious minorities — including Jews, Bahá’ís, and Mandaeans — to resettle in the United States. The program has been put on ice under the current refugee ban and its revival, advocates argue, could save thousands of lives with minimal administrative burden.

Marshall called on faith communities to leverage what she described as a dual “fire”: the prophetic voice of leaders at the top, and the grassroots flame of congregations already running welcome circles, organizing supply drives, and sheltering newly arrived families. “The challenge is combining the vision, the moral voice, with the experience,” she said, “but also the fire from above and the fire from below.”

Gana issued a challenge to the room: name a religion whose founder never crossed a border, whose good news was never carried by someone on the move. “Is there anyone here who lives in the same town or city as they were born?” she asked. Her point was plain — the entire history of global faith is a history of movement. To deny religious freedom to those in motion is to deny the very root from which most of the world’s traditions have grown.

Kino, meanwhile, urged a rethinking of asylum systems from the ground up — including independent audits of how subjective judgment and lack of country knowledge distort decisions. Her proposal: AI-assisted fact-finding tools, operated under strict human oversight, to ensure every asylum seeker receives an equal and evidence-based hearing. She also called on journalists, podcasters, and social media voices to fill a glaring coverage gap. “Is there anyone in the room who actually believes that the attention religious freedom gets in both legacy media and modern media is fair?” she asked. Not a single hand went up.

Faith & Freedom News will continue to follow the case of Matias and other religious refugees impacted by shifting asylum policies in Europe and the United States. Watch the full panel discussion at the link above, and read Nuri Kino’s Newsweek op-ed for the complete story of Matias and the systemic failures facing Iraqi Christian refugees in Sweden.