{"id":22132,"date":"2025-05-23T15:26:22","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T21:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/how-a-raleigh-ministry-decided-to-help-resettle-afrikaners\/"},"modified":"2025-05-23T21:26:22","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T21:26:22","slug":"how-a-raleigh-ministry-decided-to-help-resettle-afrikaners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/how-a-raleigh-ministry-decided-to-help-resettle-afrikaners\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Raleigh ministry decided to help resettle Afrikaners"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Deputy
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, Monday, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, (AP Photo\/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)<\/span>Julia Demaree Nikhinson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

RALEIGH, N.C. \u2013 The 12\u00d730-foot storage unit in a Raleigh, North Carolina, suburb is crammed full of chairs, tables, mattresses, lamps, pots and pans.<\/p>\n

Most of its contents will soon be hauled off to two apartments that Welcome House Raleigh is furnishing for three newly arrived refugees. It\u2019s a job the ministry, which is a project of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, has handled countless times on behalf of newly arrived refugees from such places as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria and Venezuela.<\/p>\n

But these two apartments are going to three Afrikaners \u2013 whose status as refugees is, according to many faith-based groups and others, highly controversial.<\/p>\n

Last week, Marc Wyatt, director of Welcome House Raleigh, received a call from the North Carolina field office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants asking if he could help furnish the apartments for the refugees, among the 59 Afrikaners who arrived in the U.S. last week from South Africa, he told RNS. It was a common request for the ministry that partners with refugee resettlement agencies to provide temporary housing and furniture for people in need.<\/p>\n

And at the same time, the request was extremely challenging. After thinking about it, consulting with the Welcome House network director and asking for feedback from ministry volunteers, Wyatt said yes.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur position is that however morally and ethically charged it is, our mandate is to help welcome and love people,\u201d said Wyatt, a retired Cooperative Baptist Fellowship missionary who now works for CBF North Carolina. \u201cOur holy book says God loves people. We don\u2019t get to discriminate.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recognized that Afrikaners are part of a white ethnic minority that created and led South Africa\u2019s brutal segregationist policies known as apartheid for nearly 50 years. That policy, which included denying the country\u2019s Black majority rights to voting, housing, education and land, ended in 1994, when the country elected Nelson Mandela in its first free presidential election.<\/p>\n

Like Wyatt and Welcome House, many faith-based groups are now considering whether to help the government resettle Afrikaners after the Trump administration shut down refugee resettlement for all others.<\/p>\n

Last week, the Episcopal Church chose to end its refugee resettlement partnership with the U.S. government rather than resettle Afrikaners. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said his church\u2019s commitment to racial justice and reconciliation, and its long relationship with the late Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu made it impossible for the church to work with the government on resettling Afrikaners.<\/p>\n

In January, in one of his first executive orders, President Donald Trump shuttered the decades-old refugee program, which brings people to the U.S. who are displaced by war, natural disasters or persecution. The decision left thousands of refugees, many living in camps for years and having undergone a rigorous vetting process, stranded.<\/p>\n

But then Trump directed the government to fast-track the group of Afrikaners for resettlement, saying these white farmers in South Africa are being killed in a genocide, a baseless claim. The order left many refugee advocates who have worked for years to resettle vulnerable people enraged.<\/p>\n

\u201cRefugees sit in camps for 10, 20 years, but if you\u2019re a white South African Afrikaner, then suddenly you can make it through in three months?\u201d asked the Rev. Randy Carter, director of the Welcome Network and a pastor of a CBF church. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of words I\u2019d like to attach to that, but I don\u2019t want any of those printed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter said he respects and honors the Episcopal Church\u2019s decision not to work with the government on resettling the Afrikaners, even if his network has taken a different approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe call to welcome is not always easy,\u201d Carter said. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, he said, it\u2019s important resettlement volunteers keep in mind that the ministry opposes apartheid and racism, both in the U.S. and abroad, and is committed to repentance and repair.<\/p>\n

The North Carolina field office for the USCRI resettlement group also recognized how fraught this particular resettlement is for its faith-based partners.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our communication with them, we said, \u2018Look, we know this is not a normal issue. You or your constituencies may have reservations, and we understand that. That should not affect our partnership,\u2019\u201d said Omer Omer, the North Carolina field office director for USCRI. \u201cIf you want to participate, welcome. If not, we understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wyatt got nearly two dozen comments on his Facebook post in which he announced his decision to work with the refugee agency in resettling the Afrikaners. Nearly all wrote in support of his decision. \u201cI\u2019m up sleepless pondering this,\u201d acknowledged one person. \u201cComplicated, but the right call,\u201d wrote another.<\/p>\n

USCRI did not release the names of the three Afrikaners who chose to settle in Raleigh, a couple and a single individual. Other Afrikaners chose to be resettled in Idaho, Iowa, New York and Texas.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested last week that more Afrikaners are on the way. The Trump administration argues white South Africans are being discriminated against by the country\u2019s government, pointing to a law potentially allowing the government to seize privately held land under certain conditions. Since the end of apartheid, the South African government has made efforts to level the economic imbalance and redistribute land to Black South Africans that had been seized by the former colonial and apartheid governments.<\/p>\n

Wyatt, who has been running the Welcome House Raleigh ministry for 10 years, providing temporary housing and a furniture bank for refugees, and now asylum-seekers, said he has settled the matter in his mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy wife and I have come to the position that if it\u2019s not a full welcome, just like we would with anybody else, then it\u2019s not a welcome,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we don\u2019t actually seek to include them into our lives like we would anybody else, then we\u2019re withholding something and that\u2019s not how we understand our holy book.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018We don’t get to discriminate,\u2019 says Marc Wyatt, director of Welcome House<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22132"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}