Hey, it's Aaron. This week on The Pod, Cassie Benefield, a reporter and editor with our partner Faves News, joined Luke and me to discuss Cassie's story this week about federal funding cuts to local refugee resettlement programs like World Relief Spokane. This is free range, a co production of KYRS and Range Media. I'm your host, Luke Baumgart, and I'm joined today by my colleague, Aaron Hedge. How you doing, Aaron? I'm here. I'm ready to go. I feel like that's about as about as well as we can do these days, being present and upright. I feel good being, being present and upright, I woke up this morning, it was good. I do too. Also with us today is Cassie Benefield, an editor and reporter with Faves News, who wrote in last week about how World Relief Spokane is operating after the federal government shut off the spigot of resources that have been provided to immigrant communities. They help. Thanks for joining us, Cassie. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I guess we can just dive right in. So Cassie, you published this story on, on Sunday. Just talking about how World Release Spokane is your story focuses on that organization. Is dealing with, lack of resources as Trump has come in and basically cut off a lot of resources for immigrant communities. And your story kind of begins, I just wanted to start with some humanity your story begins with a woman named Julie Horbanko. I hope I'm saying that right. She's a, she's a Ukrainian immigrant who works for World Relief Spokane. She worries that her immigration status could be revoked at any moment. Can you tell us a little bit about Julie and what she does for World Relief and what's happening with her situation? So, Julie Horbanko Her she's Ukrainian, and she and her mother came in on the, the Uniting the Ukraine, Uniting with Ukraine program, I think that's what it's called, and it was under the Biden administration, and yeah, Uniting for Ukraine, and what that did is it gave Ukrainians who were, didn't have a home because of the, of their, of their homes in Ukraine to come and live here. And it was under what they call a humanitarian parole program. And I think it was a two, it's a two year program. And they have to reapply. And hold on. And she actually did reapply and got it renewed for two years. Some of the refugees under this parole program actually well, Try to get the temporary protective status. It's just this whole there's just lots of different administration ways of becoming a refugee and working your way to becoming a Citizen yeah, I'm familiar with this I've been reporting on some some Haitian refugees and they can come in under humanitarian parole and then apply for this temporary protective status And my understanding from your reporting on Haiti is that the temporary protective status is granted country by country. And so Haitians had it and so that's why people who had come over from Haiti were able to apply for it. So is there a temporary protected status for Ukraine? It's basically for for countries that Where the conditions are very unsafe. And I'm not sure specifically about Ukraine. Is TPS in place for Ukraine? I have, I have no idea. I haven't got that far in my, In your reporting. Yeah, my studying of it. I just know that that's how they were, they were invited here. I guess that's a good way of looking at it. So she and her mother were invited here. And this program, It made it very easy to come over because all they needed was a sponsor. And so she had, her godfather was living here in Spokane and he was their sponsor. And it's like a reference, like you would have at, your job, this person's vouching for you. Okay. This is a really good point. I'm glad you brought up the you haven't gotten to whether or not Ukraine is part of the TPS program or not yet. And I see people online pushing back against some of the reporting we've done about the reasons people are, who are in the U. S. right now, either, either documented or undocumented, are getting picked up. There's this pedantry online, who are like, well, it's a humanitarian parole, which means it can be revoked at any time, blah, blah, blah. And that's true. Or, that may or may not be true, it's often these rules are pretty opaque and what's definitely true is there are some fundamental rights that America is afforded, or you're afforded just by setting foot in American soil whether or not you're a citizen or not, process is still in effect, we, you were in the middle of writing a story about or you, you just also published a story, Hedge, about the, the two men who were taken into custody after immigration officials broke out the window without a warrant and stuff. And, and the, the, the comments on Reddit, which is one of the less toxic less toxic social media platforms, were like, well, if you've even been accused of a crime, you can be kicked out of the country, and that's probably facially true in some situations, and maybe even most situations, but you can't the Fourth Amendment this is a constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure that is protecting anybody who's on social media. U. S. soil, they may have been, those men may or may not have been eligible for expulsion but what nobody is eligible for is a cop coming up to your car window without a, without a warrant and breaking out a window and taking you into custody. That's regardless of who you are that is illegal in this country. And the other, yes, and then the other thing that I've been thinking about on this topic as well is. One I've realized is the United States, at least it used to be whatever you think of the United States as a whole, but this particular part of our country is quite compassionate to be able to, to be able to afford this, to do this for other countries. I'm not saying other countries don't do this either, but it just, it's opened my awareness to that, the compassion of this program. And the other thing is, too, when you sign a contract, you don't break the contract. And so, with you her name is actually Yulia, but she goes by Julie, and here. And so she, she's have, she has a renewal and so it's like if, if the government has entered it, to your point, the government has entered into a contract with her saying you can be here for the next two years, right? And so that, but that can be revoked just like that. And then you have the, the refugee resettlement agencies were in contract. Yeah. I mean, people are having, these agencies are having to pay, pay what they were supposed to get from the government. If, on a loan, hoping that the government's going to repay them. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, we can go, we can go political a little bit here. Yeah. As a guest, you're allowed to go as political as you want. We have to watch ourselves a little bit, but. Well, I just feel that's how Trump runs his companies. He doesn't pay his bills. And he just came in and he's doing the same thing. Well, and one of the things, sorry, one of the things that I think about a lot is the, as journalists, we like to live in the nuance. It's our jobs to understand all these little details, all these little minutiae. But it's difficult. And it is very difficult. But one of the things that I've noticed is That the, when a, a good faith person in general, which in my opinion is most journalists that I've come in contact with, the nuances there, and you, you study all of that in the point, the intention behind it is. Precision of language, greater understanding, greater clarity. One of the things that I've noticed is, back to the pedant class, the pundit class, and just social media keyboard warriors. They're using nuance. To just flood the zone with oh, it's this person was probably a per whatever. It's like They're using the the complexity to create Chaos or almost, clouds of either not necessarily misinformation, but just uncertainty around What's actually true about our laws? What's true about these other things to justify? And it feels like we're experiencing a lack of compassion, a lack of compassion, but also messaging creep around the, this is just, this is just going to be dangerous criminals, dangerous criminals, dangerous criminals, dangerous criminals, a thousand percent. And now, now it's well, they're, they've overstayed their visa. Is that, wait, is that, because in, in U. S. law enforcement, at least, there's a distinction between violent and non violent crimes, or dangerous and, and so dangerous criminals, to me, suggests violent crimes have been committed, not something like a civil offense, like overstaying your visa. So there's also this message creep and so it's got to be tough to be a reporter in this in this, we're all in, I guess, in this time, I guess is my point. And so, I think we want to still live in the nuances, reporters, right? Because we still, we don't want to change the way we do our work. But I also think, and one of the reasons I'm fascinated to be talking to two religion reporters here is, I don't. I can only, I can maybe think on one hand the times that morality or what is the moral thing to do has come up in newsroom conversations I've been in over the years, but it really feels like when we're talking about our stories, Hedge, I often feel like we want to get into the nuance, but when it feels like People are trying to twist nuance, twist detail, twist complexity to make bad faith arguments. Rather than, as a dude who has a degree in philosophy, I'm like thinking about the, answering these, these tactics as though they're good faith arguments. I think it's also okay for us as journalists to say, Or, and I want to maybe pose it to you this is something I've gotten more comfortable with as the, as the information ecosystem has gotten more and more toxic, because it's just being like, no, this, there's actually a moral case here. And whatever else this person did, we have a constitution and the constitute, and if It doesn't mean that if they would have done this the right way, he, this, the people you wrote about, Hedge, might have been out of the country in a couple months after this, but we're dangerously close to this precipice of where if, if people who are here illegally and maybe, or legally, but maybe overstayed or people who, where contracts are being broken and people, and, and willy nilly statuses are being revoked. That's the beginning of a slide to, what other, what other civil rights can we take away, is what it feels like. I think, all of that pedantry that you talk about, the little minutiae that people bring up to push back is designed to distract from the core issue, which is like, Whether you're, no matter, no matter how you're here you still have constitutionally protected rights, and the federal government is not allowed, I mean, they're doing it, but they're not allowed to. They shouldn't be allowed to, yeah. Break the, or violate those rights, and, there's, obviously there's the really scary instances where, agents who are in questionable uniforms breaking through windows, but there's also like, I think, I think there's a bigger landscape, which it, that, that Julie fits into, where it's we're not honoring the, the commitments that we've made as a country. And so, can you talk about, I was, this, this actually brings me to a question I was going to ask a little later on. So, really early, as you reported in your story, there were, there were two executive orders that came down from the Trump administration, right at the start, concerning humanitarian, or surrounding humanitarian And I was hoping that you could talk just to like, set the table a little bit like, what were those orders and what is like the latest news on those orders and the kind of the rhetoric around them? And how is it, how does that fit into Julie's story? I know that like you, you wrote that Julie feels like President Trump could. Send her out of the country at any moment. Yeah, it was interesting the way she said it when I was Interviewing her it it just was like we're not used to I don't think as Americans used to arbitrary decisions Yeah, we are just not interested. We're not used to that but other people in other countries are a decision can just be so arbitrary If he just signs, if he just signs a document that we're illegal, then we're illegal, just like that, and I'm like, but that's, that's not how we do things. So, the very first week, and it's all surrounding that, protect our borders or secure borders, these, These refugee things excuse me, executive orders. Right. But the two, the two in the first week, I just concentrated on two because there's actually I think there was a slew of them. Yeah, there was a, yeah, there's several and they don't, they do different things, but these two I just focused on because they really do affect world relief in our, in our town as well as international rescue. Is that right? International Rescue Committee? Yeah. IRC here. We should just say, for people that haven't read the story, these are, these are organizations that are, that get Paid, they're private nonprofits, but they are funded by the federal government to take refugees that are here legally through governmental programs. These are not questionably documented or undocumented people. Everything people in order to get reimbursed for this, these contracts, you have to demonstrate that you've helped people who are here legally. So under no definition of what's going on, are those, are those specific organizations? They aren't even working with potentially undocumented people, these are people who are all here. No, they're, they're, yeah, from what I understand in lots of reporting, these are heavily vetted people coming to our nation. So the first, the first one was on January 20th, the suspension of the refugee resettlement program. The way that Christy Armstrong was sharing it with me, it was like. Christy Armstrong is the director of WRS, yeah, of World Relief Spokane. Yeah, and so she, she remembers they were waiting to meet people at the airport. And then, on January 20th, that stopped. And then, so that, that, that was stopped. But then it went further, and it was not only was it stopped, like suspended, The flights were cancelled. And there were people with tickets in hand, according to Christy Armstrong. And so, just, it's just gutting just to feel, I mean, as a journalist, you do feel, you walk alongside. Oh, for sure. And the emotion of it, hopefully it helps you tell a better story as well. Right. And then but, Yeah, and so that was the first order, and that was on day one. And then on February 25th, no, that's not it. Oh, that, there is something that happened good on February 25th, so, that we need to talk about. But I can't remember the other one. Did I, where is that one? On January 24th, the stop work order from the U. S. Department of State. Oh, and that had to do with the money. All that money stopped. So that money is so important for these refugees when they come here. Again, Christy Armstrong gave me a story. She wasn't 100 percent certain how many people were in the family. She just said seven. A seven member family had arrived from Sudan. It could have been nine member. And they arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs, two grocery sized bags full of belongings. Yeah. I mean, that's Their life right there in those two grocery sized bags, and wearing flip flops, and it's in the middle of January. And so each member of the household gets, it's like a welfare, and it's a What do you call that security net to it provide a comfort to help them in the first 90 days and I think the IRC Here in the community can extend that kind of support through what their funds can do I don't know if they're fun those funds come from With federal government or not. But Yeah, so it's just a very helpful thing while they're learning the language, getting settled in If we're talking about people coming from Sudan, it might be just like living through their first snowfall. Yeah, in flip flops. You just can imagine it. This money is for like very basic needs, right? Yeah. Clothing, rent, food, and transportation. So just like The basic things you need to go about your life place. I mean, they're gonna have to get new clothes. Yeah. So there's like the pass through funding that goes to the, directly to the families. I also, but they coordinate it. Yeah. And so these families, it's these are, these are families that these, these agencies, nonprofits, are supporting. Yeah. And all of a sudden you have to tell them like, they, they've been getting this money for two weeks. Or they, or they, I think it's, it is, let's say it's monthly. I can't remember. I think it's monthly. Mm-hmm I don't think I put that in there. They get disbursements. Yeah. So they get this money and then they're depending on it, planning on it. And then you as your agency, it's like they're your, your children and you're saying you're not gonna get that money anymore. Yeah. And then they have to scramble Yeah. To get that money. And so churches, I don't know, they, they weren't giving me numbers, but the, you have to, you have to use your donations for that. So it's like finding, finding the money to, yeah. Pay. These are largely, a lot of these are reimbursement programs too, so the agencies have probably incurred costs and then they usually get reimbursed by the government as well, or in a normal time. So, or is that, is that the way those work? I have, I don't know the details quite yet on that stuff. It's just this, I just know the, probably the macro, but I have a macro understanding of that. Got it. Alright, we're going to take a break for station ID and some promos and we will be right back. All right, we're back with Cassie Benefield. Yeah well. So, I'm curious, so I think one of the big things that's happening in the news, at least very recently, is, President Trump and Vice President Vance had a meeting in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and it didn't go well. They basically But it made great TV. Well, that's, I mean, that was probably the best thing about it. The cold open for Saturday Night Live. Yeah. Basically. Basically, if you haven't seen the videos, basically what happened was Trump and Vance basically, they had, they had a very confront, yeah, yeah, it was like, they bullied him into, put him in his place, they felt like they had to put him in his place, they didn't, yeah, they didn't say thank you one time since you've been here, yeah, yeah, they felt like he wasn't grateful enough for the things that the United States had provided to Ukraine. So that's like. The newsy news, but how did, like, how did you come to report on this story? Was it, was it that or was it like Did you get a tip? What, honestly, I didn't even know I was going to be interviewing a Ukrainian immigrant. I just wanted to I, this was a story I actually wanted to do around Christmas last year or Yeah, Christmas last year, because I was at an event, I reported on an event they had put on called, I think it's, It's a Small World, at Sun City Church in Spokane Valley. And they had, I think, her name, I, anyway, there was a lady that was presenting, and she was somebody, I can't remember if she was she came from the Middle East somewhere, and I, I don't know what country, so I don't want to. I don't want to guess and I was going to follow her and it was going to be a feature story and then I think all this was happening. I can't even remember like it's just all just the stars aligned and it was like, and I just asked to interview an immigrant just to get their understanding and then it just happened to be Yulia and her English is exceptional. So I'm sure that's something to do with it. So, we have such a large Ukrainian population here. And she, and she and her mom also stayed at Thrive, the Thrive Center here, and loved it. It would help them also, help them get on their feet. Yeah. Does she feel like she's, that brings up curiosity, does she feel like she's at home here? That's a good question. I mean, she's on a temporary status still, but like Definitely not now. I mean, that's that's the feeling I got from her. I mean, she can't speak for her whole community, but there is this feeling of how long is how long am I here? And then also it's it's there's a psych psychological Feeling am I even welcome and then she has to talk to herself say yes people really are nice to me here but then But then this other part of America is treating me this way. So it's, it's, there's a psychological back and forth as well. I'm on the board of Feast World Kitchen. And it's, that's, and actually there's, I don't know if he's still washing dishes, but there's like a 17 year old Ukrainian kid who came with his family right around the time the war started. I think right, right when the Thrive Thrive Center opened. And, and he was just, was basically like, Working, washing dishes at Feast to make enough money to get a car, so we could get around Spokane. Very little English was actually at the Barton School, taking language classes, I think, if I remember correctly. But like My experience of being, part of that community and just in general, like there's, there is so much, just this overwhelming welcome. They just got done with restaurant week and I was there on Sunday with my wife for one of the final services. And my ISA, the co executive director, Brought all the, there's nine chefs back there cooking for restaurant weeks. It's a little bit more elaborate than usual and had all the chefs do take a bow and the entire restaurant gave him a standing ovation. It's like the, it's got to feel really disorienting like whiplash for folks in a community like ours where some parts are so deeply, deeply welcoming and then Other parts, both this kind of abstraction on the other side of the country in the form of the federal government, but then the actual Agents of state violence like that's that's what cops are. That's that's that is like little like Dictionary definition of law enforcement federal law enforcement local law enforcement. It's the people who are You know deputized To have the power of state violence and so I was talking to my husband about that, it felt it's almost like these are like just like one grade above militia. Because they're like, they're like an authority. Funny you say that because we, this is stuff we can't really talk about on the record because it's stuff we're trying to run down. But we've been talking with a couple different groups who have been, basically people are staking out. organizations in Spokane and because many of the federal immigrate, ICE and border patrol and Homeland Security. They have some marked vehicles. They have some unmarked vehicles. Everybody sort of dresses like an operator, but of course you can buy operator gear on the internet. You can buy operator gear at, like an army army surplus store. There was a lot in the early days of oh, ICE is just staking out a local leader's house and various people's homes. And in hindsight, there are some folks we've been chatting with and we don't know if we're ever going to be able to get to a story we can actually report. We actually don't know if those early days, who was ICE and who might have just been a militia member or somebody who's decided to walk around with an AR style weapon. plate carrier, no mark, no other markings and that just to intimidate people. And so, I mean, you say, I think you're, in terms of the lived reality of a lot of people, maybe I think you might be more right than you know about like people like law enforcement in, in this sort of a capacity being one step up from militia. In some ways they're indistinguishable from militia. Yeah. Who might be just operating because, they've, they've taken it upon themselves to, to do citizen patrols of brown people, largely. Hm. I, I did want to update, there's an update to this, this story, after I had Oh, yeah, you've done more, more reporting on it after, after this Sunday's Well, I'm, I'm, I'm working on another story about this, the, there was, so even within the, the story that I have online. On February 25th, there was a, a court in Seattle. District Court Judge Jamal Whitehead actually told, ruled that the suspension needs to be suspended basically because it breaks congressional. Rules because all of this programming comes from the Congress. It's not, it's not an executive branch. You're talking about the suspension of this, this aid that this, that these executive orders. It's just the whole, the whole suspension of the refugee resettlement program. Yeah. And so, the next day, they, the federal, the Trump administration, Sent note letters saying we cancel all of our contracts or something like that. We're no longer working with you And that was ten organizations seven of which from my understanding are faith based And there's some irony there as well then then the judge Was like, okay, now what's going on because I just said to keep it going and then Say he's he required a status report from the administration as far as what what are you do? What are you doing to put back in place? this Refugee resettlement program and you have until Monday that what that was this Monday. So March 10th so in at Monday night Monday evening, and I read a report, it said Tuesday. It looks like it was to the last minute. Yeah. He acknowledged that there had been a significant, the administration acknowledged there had been a significant deterioration of functions. And so in order to Well, because they cancelled all their contracts. Well, and they probably let go several people in their own, in their own organization that works with these NGOs. Right. And so Then the administration signaled, I'm reading from a Religion News Service article that came out yesterday. It's called, it says, Faith Based Refugee Resettlement Groups Concerned About Trump Administration's New Plans. And so. The administration signal is going to move forward looking for a single service provider, which and their which would mean a drastic change in how the refugees would receive services when they arrive in the United States. So that means world relief and the IRC. Are not going to be reinstated unless one of them is hired as a, the single service provider. And so now they put a proposal out there requesting, what do they call that? A call for? Yeah, a request for proposals or something. Yeah, and they expect the process to take three months. Yeah. So, so what I'm working on is trying to Get some local reaction about that so it's cuz that that's gonna really shift I mean that just changes everything. It seems like the implications are that the programs that are in place, the organizations that have been doing this work, and are in the communities, are no longer going to be there, and then we're going to have some other contractor come in that doesn't have the same relationships, and going to have to rebuild everything. Yeah, and so, yeah, so World Relief, I'm speaking on behalf of them because they were the ones in my story. But IRC does this work as well. They've been in Spokane for I reported, didn't I say, like 32 years? Yeah. And they've been around for 80 years nationally. This is not like it's some program that's just been Fly by night. Yes. Yeah, one of the things that I'm really fascinated about is The, back to what happens in the discourse and then the way churches are reacting to this and how they've historically done it's fascinating to me that there are, so I was raised in a pretty conservative church in the 80s and 90s back then. Refugee, a different sort of refugee resettlement, or at least immigration, was extremely popular in, among conservative Christian fellow faiths, which was just adopting kids from foreign countries. I was just thinking that. My, my brother was adopted from Mexico, he, they were. Three kids that got off the plane that day when he came in from Mexico City, he was born in Veracruz, but came my dad picked him up in Mexico City. The two other kids just happened to end up going to my same church in Chattaroy, Washington up north. They had all got off the plane that day and then. After that, I think the trend was shifted from Latin America to the former Soviet bloc or China. And Romania. I mean, I have a different cousin from a different part of the family, from another relatively cons they're Presbyterian, but relatively conservative side of my family. My cousin Stanley's from Haiti, was a refugee, probably brought over, originally, from the TPS program. As I've been thinking about that, it's, and I'm not trying to get a little deeper in my thinking than just Oh, this feels like hypocrisy because the political winds have changed. It's I do, I would like to know if either of you have, and then thinking also about Matt Shea, who I'm sure we all know, but Hedge has done a lot of reporting on, he's He's one of the few people in, who's very positive about President Trump, but he's also not a pro Russia guy, an anti Ukraine guy, because his wife's from Ukraine. She's an immigrant from Ukraine. He went to Ukraine at the beginning of the war to try to get I wrote a story about this a couple years ago, to try to get, you his wife's from Kharkiv, but they were helping evacuate an orphanage in Mariupol, right, as the tanks were rolling up. And so Are you guys seeing a shift in the congregational communications? Like at that, at the congregational level? Cause I, as I was like racking my brain for, my history inside of a certain type of church, I don't remember there being a lot of blanket. immigration is bad. Keep them out. Kick out the illegals. My dad's a Mexican American from Central California, and I have heard some of my uncles who are also Mexican complain about immigration in general, but not from a faith perspective. And I still don't really see a Westboro Baptist style, the congregation level, people protesting against immigration. It seems This is what I would say. Yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts. This is what I would say. So, they're not talking about it at all. So, it's the folks who believe that it's part of their mission, which, you spoke to a guy for your piece named Nathan Theory. There's exceptions. There's exceptions. But, in general, if you're, let me just say, the last Two churches that I've attended it probably each one for probably about 10 years each That was just wasn't a topic that came up it was Abortion sure abortion came up but not refugees It's really fascinating to me and I and I wonder if and again like for I mean, for that Matt Shea in Poland story, and, and subsequently I spoke to Boris Borisov, who's runs who's a pastor in, in town. His current church isn't a Slavic Slavic Christian church, but he used to attend them. I mean. That, all of that fundraising that happened in Spokane for Ukraine, the Spokane Loves Ukraine, that entire campaign was funded by faith communities largely the Slavic Church, but also Boris's Boris's church. And so it's there has been, like, part of that whole Christian mission of charity and stuff feels like one of the places I have, I have actually a lot of critiques about. Broad Christianity as, as I've lived it in my life but one place where it's always felt pretty dialed in and pretty humanitarian has been with, whether it's refugee stuff or helping, helping people in their home countries, doing mission work, going building schools down in Mexico, building schools in Africa, and those aren't always completely without coercive practices or attempts to proselytize, but Mission work is part of the fabric of at least modern Christianity as I've lived it. And And that it, it always translated into a general permissiveness, if not outright like welcoming of refugees. Like it seemed like, Spokane for the, in the North, or for the Northwest is a relatively churchy place compared to places on the I 5 corridor. Well, to be honest, it's not. This, churched state at all. I don't know about, yeah, there's statistics that I would say that it's not a very churchy area. I think you're right. If we were comparing ourselves to the South, but comparing Spokane to Seattle. To Seattle, yeah, for sure. So, it's we have I mean, and to your point, World Relief is a faith based organization. Thrive, I don't think, is, is, might be secular, but the people that started Thrive came from World Relief, so it's like they've made a choice to maybe create a secular institution out of a faith based one, but, A lot of faith based people work at IRC. And again Feast World Kitchen is a secular, a non profit that I'm on the board of, but a ton of the help that they get comes from First Presbyterian Church, which is also started the first language school in Spokane, the Barton School, like 50 years ago. So, like these commute they're, I guess, my larger question, and I guess I'm just rambling right now, but the reason I started this question, Cassie, was like, So, for those congregations that are being quiet do you, are you getting a sense, and maybe you want to chime in on this too, Hedge, it's is there anything percolating in these communities to be like, no, we actually, we do need to speak up, because this is our faith that's being talked about. I don't know. So that's, so we had this conversation before we went to air about, my particular Christianity right now that I'm restructuring. All I can say is where I was going which is a lovely community it just was not talked about. And I think a large portion of it is the shift. In the politics of what happened with the support of Ukraine, and I wasn't really tracking that very well because it just, you track so much and you just, you can't track it all, but I think I would say the zeal for Ukraine might have waned if it was there at all in some of the more conservative churches if the news News media that they are in also waned. That's where, that's where I would, that's where I would land. Interesting. Yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? Have you chimed in to, or have you tuned in to On Fire recently or anything, Hedge, about, like, how's How's Shea and his congregation, if they are at all, navigating this pro Ukraine, pro Trump stance? Especially, especially post Zelensky, yeah, that would be interesting. That would be a good story. If not, you might, you might have something to do on Sunday, my man. Check that out. I'm going on Sunday. Are you? It'll be the first time I've attended in A few weeks, because I've been, I've been really focused on some other stories that I've had a learning curve for, but I I, I do, so, so Matt Shea is a nuanced creature in some ways. He, he like, he's very, he's very pro Trump like full throatedly endorsed him on stage. Yeah. At his church in front of his congregation, said that the biblical vote is a vote for Trump. Oh wow. And like at the pulpit. Which in a, in a, maybe in a different, or at least in my imagination of America, like that would get your tax status revoked actually. That's not a thing. Non profits are allowed to do, or shouldn't be, but they do. That's not really what do you call it? They don't investigate that stuff. That's what I was just going to say. But the Johnson Amendments are not enforced. Yeah. And the pastors know that, but and Matt Shea's church is a non profit. Yeah. But, I would say, he's very he's not pro Ukraine. His wife is from Ukraine. He's pro. I see. So that's how he's slicing. It's pro, like he's pro-con confessing church, that, that type of thing. Like underground Christianity in Ukraine. He, he, he is very interested in Ukrainian culture. He's very anti-Russian. He has a lot of commentary from his perspective as a military intelligence officer, that's, that's what he's trained as. And, and a lawyer. And he has all these, he always gives updates about the war in Ukraine, where it's at and he's usually talking about how Russia doesn't have as many resources as it says it has. I mean, He also believes that the Soviet Union never actually dissolved, and that 1990 1991 was a big conspiracy theory, and that, I don't like that. It's true. And he sees, he sees communist Russia, communist China as being aligned with fundamental Islam. He calls it the, the red green axis, the, the communist jihadi alliance. It probably, it probably fo centers into his end times. It's, yeah, yeah, okay. His end time theology. Well, everything. And also, it also ignores the war that Russia fought in Afghanistan against fundamentalist Muslims when the Soviet Union was in power. That's, that's the great thing about conspiracy theories. That was a cover, right? Oh. But, that was, that was, those were all, that was an entire country full of crisis actors. An entire country of crisis actors. Got it. Well, and I think, I think, yeah. Bringing it home a little bit though he, he does have, he does have a heart for the Ukrainian people and he, he wants Love the people, hate the government. Love the sinner, hate the sin. But he does not, and he, I don't, I don't know whether he's pro Ukrainian. Migration to the United States. I've never heard him say anything like that, but it worked out well for his family and so far as he's married to her, he's very, very concerned about the many tens of thousands of, this is according to him, right? This is a conspiracy theory that's pretty widely spread on the right of military age Chinese men coming across the southern border. Anything, anything with anything with brown people coming across the southern border is very concerning to Matt Shea. And so I think there, there is, there is an element of racism to it. I don't think, I don't think racism is central to Matt Shea's ideology, but, like, it's, it's E easy. And, and he believe, he believes he, he is, he is a full throated nationalist. He says all the time, frequently on his, on his radio show that God is a nationalist. Jesus is a nationalist. Oh yes, they created nations in Genesis 10. And borders should be strong and people should be kept apart from each other. Like culture should be strong and he. He believes in a European culture oh my goodness. That doesn't represent the landscape of churches in Spokane. No, it doesn't. Yeah. Or in general. And so, and so to the extent that, Cassie, you, you, you quoted Nathan Thiery, who's the, he runs discipleship and outreach for Faith Bible Church. And that is a conservative church, has a, has a John MacArthur. Wing like a grace Bible church wing. So very conservative, but he, he told you, he said to stop receiving and resettling. Refugees in the USA is a great tragedy. And it saddens me. We hope and pray that the government will permit legal, careful refugee resettlement to continue soon. And so that's that's a really compassionate Christian. So there's a spectrum, right? Even, even among. conservative churches. You say, and I think this is like you're drawing from your own experience that most of the churches just aren't addressing it at all. There's some people who are very full throated support of immigration. Some people who are, obviously like I, I don't, I don't know what I mean. I, what we would say in our dialect is the spirit hasn't moved them in that direction. right. Okay. Yeah. So, um, and it, it I I'm very judgmental right now, so I'm not gonna go there. So I'm sorry, I, I would, I would say though that like the institutions. The people who are controlling the levers of power right now are definitely in alignment with the mass shade view of the world. The broad Christian nationalist view. I think there's two, at least two different, I think there's more than one because if you look at like your Albert Muller, who was, is a Southern, the Southern Baptist fella who's like genius, brilliant, and he's a CPAC. Huh. You, which is the really conservative political action committee. And isn't that, didn't, is that where Elon Musk did his, what's it called? It's where Elon Musk did his thing when, when Trump was elected in 2016, like CPAC had been around for a while, but that was. part of what helped like the sort of the Christian nationalist right to rise to ascendancy but not necessarily like your, forgive me, Marjorie Taylor green. There's just, there's just, there's two kinds of cultures there. But then the first CPAC conference outside of America was in Hungary for Victor Orban. And that was where Sebastian Gorka was like, so it's that was, that began this intermingling of Christianity with whether you call it. Christian nationalism or not, like hyper conservative Christianity and hyper conservative nationalism started getting together. I would say it's these people okay, so Albert Mueller, he is more this moral, he wants to be like the moral authority over government. Yeah. And then the Christian nationalists. I want to reinvent it after their own imagination. They want to be That it's past. Writing actual biblical laws, right? And is that a distinction without a difference? Or, to you guys, or? I, I don't know. I, I, I, I'm just baffled by it all. Sure. But I, I would say that there's, It's oh, I don't want to be judgmental or hurtful. But it's You're so nice. It's like you've got this, the Harvard. You've got the Harvard, Princeton Type and then you have the Azusa Street Revival type, right? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah and then you have folks like like Doug Wilson down in Christchurch who seem to do a little bit of both because they do the Concert, you know the traditional schooling which is like Harvard principles of education They actually teach, Pete Hegseth is connected to Doug Wilson. Yep He, he went to a, a Doug Wilson affiliated church. He loves Doug Wilson. Yeah, yeah. So it does feel like there's, there's, there's, there's different, there's different tendrils in this cause I don't think Doug Wilson wants to take over the government. Well, I think, I, I think, I think what's, what's. He's definitely running people for local or encouraging his, he wants to congregation Moscow, Idaho, Moscow, not necessarily America, although is this just a Yeah. Is that just a, a staging for the future? I think that, I think what's a display here in this conversation is it's really complicated. It is like that, like the way that churches see immigration and the way that they. The way that they align themselves or don't align themselves with, what's happening at the federal level is so very complicated. And then there's, I'm going to add another complication, so we have a little bit more time. So, Kristen Kobez Dumais, and she wrote Jesus and John Wayne, and she's knee deep right now. Yeah. And she put out a post said it could be worse. And it was about the Insurrection Act and what we could do. And basically, I think she's quoting this person called Brett Wagner. I've never heard of him. He he was the former professor of National Security Decision Making at the U. S. Naval War College. He brought up in his op ed that was in the San Francisco Chronicle, I think. She just said yeah that there are Buildings and areas that are under consideration for detention centers to move when the immigration sites that they're holding the fill up They're already looking for new sites to move the immigrants that are waiting for the next the next I actually heard there's a private prison being built in central Washington that would, cause in Washington a public prison facility would not be allowed to, to participate with ICE. So it needs to be private? I'm not ready to report that out yet. That's actually something I've been meaning to shoot over to you, Hedge. It seems, it's a little bit outside our coverage area, but it's obviously, it's, it's close enough. Well, this, it was a Guantanamo and then another one. Former Leavenworth Detention Center. Yep. Located near Kansas City, Missouri. And so And Leavenworth is a prison that is notori Yes. It was like so notoriously dangerous they stopped using it. So we're putting people in Basically, effectively a concentration camp in, in Guantanamo Bay. And then a, a federal facility that was decommissioned because of how dangerous and brutal it was. And it's not like we haven't done it before. Hmm. Right. With the German camps during World War II. Yep. Man, we only have two minutes left. We should probably wrap it up here. Real quickly, in two minutes, what's One of the things I've been fascinated about with, I feel like there are versions, there's a microcosm of Spokane, of all these different tendencies on the Christian right. What's going on with are there trad cats in Spokane? Is the is the, is the sort of monarchist Catholic thing that's happening in a lot of national stuff? You know who you need to talk to is Joan Braun. Okay, I will talk to Joan Braun about that. Joan's my buddy. Maybe we'll have Joan Braun to talk about traditional Catholics in Spokane. She's that, that's more her, her area. There's definitely some trad catholics over in like the post falls like on the border area there. I don't, I don't know about it. Yeah. And she's got some, she knows some history also about the Immaculate Heart Retreat Center. Okay. The source of not that center now, but. The original? Yeah, what that came out of. There's something interesting background there too. I'll actually send her a text on my way out of the radio show. Alright, well, Cassie Benfield, this has been really, really great. And I feel like it got better as we went, so we're going to have to have you back. Just remember how awesome the conversation was right at the end there. And we'll pick right up where we left off. It was fun. Thank you for joining us. Really enjoyed it. Alright, let me sign off here. Do you have questions about local government? Wondering who to complain to about an issue in your neighborhood? Wondering which agency governs certain things? Wondering why something is happening and, or how much it costs? Email us at freerange at kyrs. org with your questions and we'll try to answer them next week. Free Range is a weekly news and public affairs program presented by Range Media and produced by Range Media and KYRS Community Radio, KYRS, Medical Lake Spokane. Cassie, Erin, and everybody out there listening, have a good weekend.