| After Trump eviscerated the refugee-resettlement system, the government was unprepared for Afghans displaced by their country’s collapse. A new program lets civilians step up to help.  Photograph by Yasmin Yassin for The New Yorker Duluth, Minnesota, did not look like the most obvious home for four young women from Afghanistan, who had fled the Taliban takeover. “We Googled Duluth and saw how much snow there was,” one tells Eliza Griswold, who shares the women’s harrowing story: months spent moving among windowless safe houses to avoid capture, before eventually getting spots on a flight out of the country. Yet Duluth offered a chance for the four to stay together, and to continue their education, thanks to volunteer members of the Sponsor Circle program, a group of “American military veterans, retired professors, pastors, and hundreds of others” who have stepped up to help resettle displaced Afghans after the U.S. government proved unable to meet the challenge. As Griswold explains, Sponsor Circles are not a perfect solution—they lack the expertise and funding of government agencies—but, as the global migration crisis deepens, and the federal commitment to aid refugees ebbs and flows with each new political development, such citizen-led resettlement programs will likely remain vital. As one volunteer puts it, “I said yes partly in defiance of the people in this county who supported Trump’s executive order to ban immigrants.” —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor | 
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