In February, amid an anxious mood at the International Organization for Migration headquarters in Geneva, staff members received two major announcements in their emails: one, about 3,000 employees were about to get laid off in agencywide job cuts; and two, news of the high-level appointment of Michele Sison, a close ally of Director-General Amy Pope, another American, greeted the much-disoriented employees of the agency, known as IOM.
Sison, 66, assumed her new role shortly after leaving her job in the United States State Department as an assistant secretary of state for International Organization Affairs, a position she left in January 2025 after being appointed to the post by President Joe Biden in December 2021. As a career Foreign Service officer, Sison had also been US ambassador to Haiti, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Sri Lanka/Maldives.
She served as the deputy permanent representative at the US Mission to the UN from 2014 to 2018. In 2023, Sison was also a candidate to head the UN’s Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs but that didn’t work out.
Beyond the questionable optics of appointing a senior official during a financial crisis, Sison’s appointment as director of the Washington-based IOM Global Office may also violate the organization’s internal rules on staff age. PassBlue found that appointments cannot be offered to candidates who are 63 and older. Sison, born in 1959, turned 66 in May. At the time of her hire, she was technically over the age limit, which would have made her ineligible under the stated guidelines.
IOM did not respond to PassBlue’s request for clarification on whether her appointment complies with its age-related policy.
IOM staffers, many of whom have been forced from the organization due to extensive funding cuts by the United States this year, said in multiple anonymous emails seen by PassBlue that Sison’s appointment and its timing were insensitive to hundreds of junior- and mid-level employees who have lost their jobs.
Pope announced in an internal memo, first reported by Devex in January, that the agency would be forced to slash approximately 3,000 staff members working for the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) after funding cuts. An additional 20 percent staff cut, affecting 250 positions at IOM headquarters, followed shortly thereafter. In total, IOM has laid off more than 6,000 of its personnel worldwide so far this year.
Although Pope assured staff in an email that executive posts would not be spared from the “structural adjustments,” this has not been the case. Sources told PassBlue that jobs close to Pope have largely been protected from the major shakeup.
“Staff are furious,” an anonymous source said in an email obtained by PassBlue. “She shed dozens of experienced civil servants with decades of experience managing migration-related programs and has surrounded herself by people who are new and loyal to her.”
Sison’s hire has been criticized by staff and critics as a political favor, tied to her apparent role in Pope’s successful 2023 campaign for the top IOM position, traveling with her globally to promote her candidacy. At the time, Pope, who was deputy director-general, challenged her own boss, António Vitorino of Portugal, and she won the support of the Biden administration to take the reins of IOM. Pope’s campaign marked the return of the agency’s leadership to American hands. Since the agency’s founding in 1951, only two non-Americans have led it.
An IOM spokesperson told PassBlue in an email on July 11 that Sison’s new role was created in September 2024 to expand operations in the organization’s Washington office. “IOM has had a DC office for over 30 years,” the spokesperson said, “and Ambassador Sison’s expertise is vital, particularly during this challenging moment for global migration.”
The D2-level role held by Sison comes with major benefits. While the recruitment notice for the job did not include a salary range, UN D2-level positions in Washington typically pay $224,061 to $270,051 annually. However, the job listing did state that the appointment would be “subject to funding confirmation.” In 2024, the US was the IOM’s largest donor, contributing $1.6 billion in voluntary funding to its operations. That support has dropped significantly with President Donald Trump’s UN-wide and other funding cuts, but neither IOM nor the State Department provided precise information on the amounts.
Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees all video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
