When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Christians had good reason to believe the United States had turned a corner when it came to prioritizing persecuted believers overseas. But under his administration refugee admissions have plunged to historic lows, with persecuted Christians in the Middle East suffering from the fallout.

The number of Middle East Christians admitted into the United States in 2018 fell by a staggering 98 percent from 2016. Christians from countries Open Doors ranked highest for religious persecution saw a 76 percent decline from 2016 to 2018. The trend continues in 2019. By March 2019 the United States had welcomed only 30 Iranian Christians, 25 Iraqi Christians, and zero Syrian Christian refugees.

To some believers, these numbers tell a different story than Trump himself told in the past. In a January 2017 interview with Christian Broadcasting Network News, Trump implied that the Obama administration had overlooked the plight of persecuted Christians and said his administration would be different. “We are going to help them,” he said. “They’ve been horribly treated. If you were a Christian in Syria, it was impossible, at least very, very tough, to get into the United States. If you were a Muslim, you could come in. But if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.”

Much has been made of the 80 percent of white evangelicals who voted for Trump, a key political bloc he continues to court. Yet he runs the risk of growing disillusionment among Christians for whom their persecuted brethren is a key concern.

Among them is a community of Chaldean Christians in a Detroit suburb in Michigan. The National Catholic Register reported that a growing community of Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria helped flip Macomb County, a key suburb, red. Trump won Michigan by a mere 10,704 votes. Chaldean Christians were largely responsible for Macomb’s flip. They voted for Trump because of “what is happening to Christians in Iraq and Syria, because we have loved ones in the area,” according to Martin Manna, president of the Chaldean Community Foundation.

But rather than welcoming their families into the United States, Chaldean Christians saw their own families threatened with deportation back to Iraq. In 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained around 130 Iraqi Christians from the area, some for criminal offenses committed decades ago. The community turned out on the streets, touting signs with pictures of Trump and the words “You vowed to protect us” and “Stop the Deportation.” (The deportation has been temporarily halted, in part due to the ACLU and local leaders’ lobbying efforts.)

Cliff Sims, a former administration staffer who wrote Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, noted in his book that Trump kept his promises on many things important to evangelicals, “but not the ones he made to persecuted Christians.”

Instead, persecuted Christians have become collateral damage in the administration’s tough policies on immigration and refugees.

In fiscal year 2018 the United States set a refugee ceiling of 45,000 people, but only welcomed 22,491 refugees, roughly half the goal. A good chunk of those were Christians, but often not from the areas where religious minorities face the harshest persecution and even genocide.

For fiscal year 2019 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a cap of 30,000. It is the lowest cap since President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act into law in 1980. The United States has admitted 10,700 refugees so far in fiscal year 2019, which began Oct. 1, 2018—2,000 are Christians from countries where they face persecution (28 from Iraq, and three from Syria).

“You have two things in conflict,” Sims told me. “Trump’s hard-line position on immigration and refugees; then you have a more nuanced piece of that—hey, but there are persecuted Christians there who are fleeing ISIS in Syria, in northern Iraq. If we don’t help them, who is going to?”