Ranking Member Kamlager-Dove Delivers Opening Remarks at South and Central Asia Subcommittee Hearing on Burma and the Rohingya Refugee Crisis
November 19, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee Ranking Member Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37) delivered opening remarks at the subcommittee's hearing on Burma and the Rohingya refugee crisis.
Congresswoman Kamlager-Dove's opening remarks as delivered are below and can be watched here:
Thank you, Madam and Mr. Chair, for bringing us together for this joint bipartisan hearing so we can speak with one voice on this important topic.
The conflict in Burma reverberates far beyond its borders, and I wanna focus especially on the instability it creates in South Asia. The largest refugee encampment in the world is in Bangladesh, home to a forgotten crisis. The 1.5 million Rohingya refugees who fled ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Burmese military junta in what the United States determined to be a genocide in '22.
For the Rohingya, Rakhine State in Burma is their motherland and their home. But for decades, they have been treated as outsiders in their own land, targeted by the military, maligned by other Burmese ethnic minorities, and stripped of their citizenship. The Rohingya are now the world's largest stateless population, a status passed down from one generation to the next.
Years after renewed ethnic cleansing and the outbreak of civil war, the Rohingya in Burma are still the lar target of brutal genocidal violence. The Arakan Army, an ethnic armed organization that resumed fighting the military junta in late '23 has massacred the Rohingya in territory under its control. This has forced an additional 150,000 Rohingya to seek safety in Bangladesh in the past 18 months alone.
In Cox's Bazar, however, the Rohingya confront another harrowing set of challenges. Bangladesh, which faces major strains on its state capacity, has demonstrated incredible generosity in hosting the Rohingya refugees, a responsibility that must be shouldered by the entire international community. And while we all share the same goal for the Rohingya to live safely as equal citizens in their home country, policies to ensure that the refugee camps remain a temporary solution have, in many ways, had the opposite effect.
Instead, it has deprived the Rohingya of their agency to build a life for themselves and end their reliance on government and international support. The Rohingya do not have the right to work or the freedom of movement to leave the camps. They have limited access to any livelihood or educational opportunities, depriving them of the right to human development. They are not permitted to build permanent structures, resulting in vulnerability to flooding, landslides, and fires, and constant costly rebuilding.
Insecurity in the camps has exploded as armed groups battle for dominance and traffic young Rohingya into prostitution, slavery, or conscription in the Burmese military. Women and girls are disproportionately impacted, as always, with an uptick in gender-based violence and child marriages as conditions deteriorate.
The Rohingya crisis requires sustained U.S. leadership to support the Bangladesh Government, ensure robust assistance and improvements to the humanitarian response, and to find permanent solutions for many of the Rohingya. Alleviating the pressure on Bangladesh's limited state capacity is essential to promoting stability in the country as the interim government works to rebuild from past authoritarian rule and manage its political transition ahead of elections next year.
While I was glad to see the administration announce new funding pledges to support Rohingya refugees, the $168 million the administration provided in fiscal year '25 is less than half of the $354.5 million the United States provided in '24, even as humanitarian needs arise. Such a significant funding cut will directly impact the lives of Rohingya, whose food rations amount to about $12 a day.
The U.S. must also work with the Bangladesh Government and our partners in the region to improve conditions for the Rohingya, both within the camps and to find sustainable solutions outside the camps. This first and foremost requires a cohesive regional strategy that goes beyond a singular focus on tariffing our partners or pursuing a Nobel Peace Prize.
Resettling Rohingya refugees to safe third countries is an essential part of this effort. If the State Department is engaging other countries to accept U.S. deportation flights, they should also be working with partners to resettle stranded refugees into a long-term solution. With newly confirmed leadership in the South and Central Asia Bureau, I hope to see sustained diplomatic engagement and resource prioritization, prioritization for the Rohingya refugee crisis, and I am ready to work with the administration on a bipartisan basis to push for sustained solutions for the Rohingya, especially as Bangladesh elects a new government early next year.
I look forward to today's robust discussion and how we can work together to address the Rohingya crisis and the conflict in Burma that is driving it.
Additionally, a transcript of a portion of the Congresswoman's questioning can be found below:
Congresswoman Kamlager-Dove:
I also I know that this year the Trump administration terminated U.S. support for the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, which allows disadvantaged women to get higher education via U.S.-funded scholarships. So, could you speak to—and maybe you too, Ambassador Currie—speak to the impact of that program for Rohingya girls and the need for education for children in the camps?
Ms. Lucky Karim:
Yeah. I was one of the first Rohingya girls to begin with and to go to the university back in 2019, and we now have I think 100 or so students already at the campus. For generations and generations in Burma, Rohingya have been denied access to education after just high school, and so this this was the first time in many generations that a larger group of women had access to higher education at the university. And that allows women to be part of the decision-making processes, to speak up against their injustices, and to be able to do the work in the camps freely, and to serve the community and their families.
And I'm one of the examples of that. Getting access to the education from that university and being able to deliver the messages of my community today. So that will allow Rohingya women to prevent from gender-based violence, from sexual violence, from even human traffickers to be able to get access to education, so I would encourage to continue funding the programs and to allow Rohingya children in the camps—and especially girls, in particular, at the university—to continue studying.
Congresswoman Kamlager-Dove:
Thank you. I don't know, Ambassador Currie, if you wanted to add?
Ambassador Kelly Currie:
I think you can see from Lucky that she is one of the success stories of that program and that initiative. There was also an initiative to fund slots at that same university for Afghan women and girls that has also been—as far as I know—is also gone.
This is a, again, very small program, but very high impact. We were able to leverage small amounts of funding, give the scholarships through the Asian University for Women, and it created a network of women within the camps who were able to advocate for their own rights, the rights of their family, the rights of their camp block, to deal with situations of gender-based violence, of criminal gangs operating in the camps.
These women were really—and have been and still are—one of the main protective elements in the camps, where there aren't very many protective elements. And you have to imagine a city of 1.3 million people that is basically run by criminal gangs and that's mostly comprised of women and children.
And you can only let your mind wander to where that ends up. It it is a really dangerous and and deprived place, the camps in Kutupalong, and so these women really are incredible in the work that they do inside the camps and to protect their communities and their families.