To get more context on how American refugee policy has historically worked, and why Trump’s is such a major change, I called Mark Hetfield, the director of HIAS, a refugee resettlement organization. HIAS was formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and it was one of the main groups that helped resettle Soviet Jews in the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s. Hetfield himself was one of the people stationed in Rome to process families like mine, though we don’t know whether he interacted with us specifically.

Until Friday, HIAS was one of nine agencies helping resettle the 85,000 refugees of all religious and ethnic backgrounds that enter the United States each year. Now, all of their work has ground to a halt. They have been calling families who thought they would soon be Americans and telling them they instead have to return to their war-torn homelands.

The policy had actually made it harder for Christians from the Middle East to resettle in America, Hetfield said in our interview. And he believes it’s diminished America from being a stellar example of refugee resettlement to a disgraceful one. An edited transcript follows.

Olga Khazan: What have you guys been doing, and how have the past 48 hours changed things?

Mark Hetfield: Our job is to get refugees at the airport, put them into an apartment, get the apartments furnished, get the kids in school, try get the parents a job, make them self-sufficient within 180 days, get the family to learn English and get them on the road to being an American citizen.

This has been in many ways the worst three days of my life, and in many ways the best. HIAS has had to undergo a lot of transformations, but this has been the most revolutionary. We have been a partner with the U.S. government for 37 years. It’s truly a partnership, we've gotten a lot of funding from them. As of Friday, the U.S. government became the enemy. We are now fighting for our life, we're fighting them. We’re fighting because we think what they did was totally un-American. We had to change from being part of the establishment to being part of the insurgence. The reason it's been a good experience is that we have our entire community behind us. We set a fundraising record today.

We’re also putting out fires. Luckily there were no refugees arriving this weekend, but there were other people who qualify as refugee-like. Yesterday there was a case where a man in Connecticut from Syria, who fled Syria three years ago for Jordan and two years ago he applied and got asylum in the U.S., but he was separated from his wife and daughters. He filed for asylum for her, the petition was granted, and after two years of separation, she had all her paperwork and approvals, got vetted. She got a plane ticket to come to the U.S. with their five- and eight-year-old daughters. They got on a plane, they were flying from Amman to JFK via Kiev. They got off at Kiev and the airline wouldn’t let them board. They were sent back to Jordan, where they had no home. They had to find a place to live, crash with another refugee family, the father is absolutely despondent, as are they. They keep asking us what they can do. I said, there's nothing you can do legally because you haven't touched the United States. Donald Trump just pulled the rug out from under them. There are dozens or hundreds of cases like that already. There will be thousands.