More Than 160,000 Americans Across 7,700 Zip Codes Stepped Up to Welcome Refugees

When the Welcome Corps launched in January 2023, it asked a simple but audacious thing of ordinary Americans: would you personally help a refugee family build a new life in your town? A retrospective published by the Niskanen Center in April 2025 reveals just how resoundingly people answered. By January 2025, more than 160,000 Americans had signed up to privately sponsor refugees — gathering in small groups to welcome newcomers and walk alongside them through their first months in a new country.

The program worked by turning resettlement into a hands-on, neighborly act. Groups of at least five sponsors raised money, found housing, enrolled children in school, helped adults navigate job searches and offered the everyday friendship that makes a strange place start to feel like home. Sponsors collectively committed more than 210 million dollars in private support — raising roughly 2,425 dollars per refugee — without federal resettlement funding. In its first year, the program grew quickly, with 15,000 applicants stepping forward to sponsor more than 7,000 refugees.

“A retrospective published by the Niskanen Center in April 2025 reveals just how resoundingly people answered.”

What stands out in the Niskanen analysis is how broadly the welcome spread. Sponsors emerged in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, across more than 7,700 zip codes. The top sponsoring states — Minnesota, Texas, California, Washington, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Georgia — span the political map, an unusually bipartisan coalition in a polarized era. And it was not just big cities: people stepped up in tiny towns like Columbus Junction, Iowa (population 1,771) and Marks, Mississippi (population 1,283).

One story captures the program's reach. In Bend, Oregon — about three hours from the nearest resettlement agency — sponsors from Antioch Church successfully welcomed a Colombian refugee family, something that would have been nearly impossible under the older, agency-dependent system. That is the quiet genius of community sponsorship: it lets places far from traditional infrastructure participate in welcoming, and it transforms abstract policy into a relationship between real neighbors. While federal admissions policies have shifted, the retrospective stands as a durable record of something hopeful — that across red and blue America alike, well over a hundred thousand people chose to open their communities to strangers in need.