HALIFAX, Canada — Most of the people at the Halifax International Security Forum (HFX) are senior lawmakers, high-ranking military officials or foreign policy experts. As president and CEO of the Jewish refugee group HIAS, Mark Hetfield knows his work puts him in the minority twice over: the exclusive, 300-person conference has no other Jewish communal leaders this year, and only a scant few representatives from the humanitarian world.

But Hetfield, who has been a regular at HFX for nearly a decade, said that it makes perfect sense for a conference focused on promoting democracy and the rules-based international order to invite the leader of one of the world’s leading refugee groups.

“We have the greatest number of refugees in human history right now,” Hetfield told Jewish Insider in an interview at the conference on Saturday. “It’s a problem that the United States can’t solve alone, and certainly under Trump won’t. It requires a multilateral response, so it’s good to be at a multilateral forum.”

A chief concern among HFX attendees, hailing from Canada, Europe, the United States and more than 60 democratic nations, is how to prepare for a second Trump administration. While President-elect Donald Trump’s 2016 election shocked a deeply unprepared Europe, America’s allies are now better equipped to handle his unpredictable style of governance, even if they are also still a bit wary. 

Unlike in 2016, Hetfield is not shell-shocked. Back then, he didn’t know what to expect from Trump, even as Trump’s first campaign was full of anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

Now, he knows what might happen — and he is worried. 

“There’s a real danger that the Trump administration will bring us in the wrong direction. When you read the Republican platform, there are many, many references to immigration, but they’re all negative,” said Hetfield. “Whereas, you know, migration is a reality in the world today that every country has to deal with, and can be and is generally a positive when dealt with effectively. That’s kind of the crossroads that we’re at.” 

Many of the liberal activists who were immediately energized in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory are now feeling dejected. Hetfield hasn’t yet seen much grassroots energy from activists who would want to push back on Trump’s immigration messaging.

“At this moment, I would say energy is not at the [high point] it was at in 2016 at the same time,” said Hetfield. “But as we saw with family separation in the Trump administration, once a mass deportation policy gets underway, or once the refugee program is completely closed down, I think there will be a really strong uprising against that.” 

In his first term, Trump sharply curtailed the number of refugees admitted to the United States each year. Now, he has promised to undertake “mass deportations,” which could also affect some asylum-seekers who crossed the border illegally. Hetfield also worries the refugee program could be shuttered entirely. (With just over 100,000, 2024 saw the largest number of refugees admitted to the U.S. in nearly three decades.) 

“It will be more challenging, because the U.S. government will no longer be our leading partner, as it currently is, and we’ll have to be more creative to protect people,” said Hetfield. “But it’s a problem we’ve had to confront many times in our history, not just as an organization, let alone as a people.”

Founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society more than a century ago, HIAS helped bring generations of Jewish refugees to the U.S. Now, nearly all of the people the organization assists are not Jewish; they come from places like Ukraine and Afghanistan and Eritrea. (After Oct. 7, the organization mounted an emergency response to help displaced communities within Israel.)

But Hetfield said the organization’s values should be familiar to Jews. In 1924, quotas targeted Jewish and Catholic immigrants seeking to come to the U.S. He sees parallels to today’s conversations about immigrants, a century later.

“We’ve been through this ourselves once before, and so it gives us a natural, I would say, moral obligation and empathy,” said Hetfield. “Because this is what we went through 100 years ago in 1924 when these very same actions were directed against us, literally.”