For three decades, ICMC has proudly partnered with the US State Department to conduct resettlement processing and cultural orientation (CO) for hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking to be resettled in the United States. Our work together began with the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, when the State Department  entered into cooperative agreement with ICMC to create the first Joint Voluntary Department Agency (JVA) to lead the operations of the Orderly Department Program for Vietnamese refugees.  In 1983, our JVA created the Amerasian case processing pursuant to the Amerasian Homecoming Act and, in 1989, ICMC led a separate Re-Education sub-program to better meet the needs of reeducation camp detainees.

Since this first JVA, ICMC's implementation of large-scale processing operations for the US grew to include such countries as Croatia, Lebanon, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sudan, Thailand and Turkey. The ICMC ESL/CO program in the Philippines became the largest residential training program ever established for refugees in the world.  From 1994-2001, our CO programs for Bosnian refugees included training sites in Croatia, Hungary, Germany and Slovenia by the program's close, 45,000 refugees benefitted from ICMC's Zagreb-based CO program prior to their departure to the US.

ICMC directly assists refugees in need of resettlement through the Resettlement Support Services (RSC) in Istanbul, Turkey, by preparing cases for presentation to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and facilitating pre-departure processes, such as cultural orientation and medical examinations. An ICMC sub-office in Lebanon further provides support, while mobile teams work with individuals and their families in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. 

Since 2007, ICMC's resettlement programme has experienced steady growth, largely in response to Iraqis who have fled to Turkey and Lebanon since 2006.  Of the more than 18,600 Iraqi nationals resettled to the US in 2010, approximately 6,140 supported by ICMC in Turkey. In addition to Iraqis, ICMC works with women, children and men of more than 25 different nationalisties, including Afghans, Iranians and Somalis.