A ministry of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina is helping settle Afrikaner refugees who have traveled from South Africa to the United States, seeing it as a biblical mandate to help even if they disagree with the Trump administration’s handling of refugee admissions.
Welcome House Raleigh (WHR), a CBF ministry that helps with refugee settlement, has assisted three of the dozens of Afrikaners who came to the United States this month. The white South African people group mainly descended from Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 1600s.
The Rev. Marc Wyatt, founder and director of WHR, told The Christian Post that his organization is helping with two resettlement cases — a married couple and a single adult — and more might be on the way.
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“We didn’t actually imagine that Afrikaners would come to North Carolina,” Wyatt recounted. “We assumed they would go more Midwest, because as I understand it, many are from the agricultural community, but needless to say, three did come.”
Wyatt’s charity helps refugees in multiple ways, including providing temporary housing, English language courses and furnishings for any newly acquired permanent residences.
Although WHR’s housing units are full, Wyatt said the ministry will provide furniture for the three refugees once they are settled in the state.
The mission program first became involved in the resettlement process for the three Afrikaners when Wyatt received a phone call from Omer Abdallah Omer, the North Carolina field office director for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
The charity head said the decision to help the Afrikaners “was a hard one because, from our understanding and perspective, they did not fit the definition of refugees.”
Wyatt took issue with the Trump administration’s canceling of the refugee resettlement program and the freezing of funding, which had negativelyimpacted multiple Christian humanitarian groups and left thousands of refugees fleeing violence and persecution in other countries in limbo, even though they were already approved to resettle in the U.S.
Nevertheless, Wyatt told Omer that “we had thought about this in advance, been praying about it, referring to the Scripture on it, and that we felt that our mandate to help was broader than the humanitarian help, it was broader than our moral, ethical and political particular positions on some issues.”
“For us, the mandate was a Gospel mandate,” Wyatt told CP. “The Gospel does not give us an exclusionary clause to say, ‘We’ll only help neighbors we want to help, neighbors we want to love.’ The Good Samaritan speaks to that.”
“We don’t feel that the Holy Spirit is giving us an exemption clause to withhold welcome, withhold hospitality, withhold love to a neighbor, even if that neighbor is a questionable person.”
Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced it would resettle small numbers of Afrikaners in the United States, accusing the black-led South African government of engaging in anti-white policies. Trump has criticized South Africa for passing a law allowing for the seizure of agricultural properties without proper compensation.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed an Expropriation Act into law in January that allows the government to take over land and any other property without compensation.
During a meeting at the White House last Wednesday, Trump confronted Ramaphosa about allegations of Afrikaners being killed. He asked aides to dim the lights as a video began to play showing footage of South Africa’s minority Economic Freedom Fighters Party singing the apartheid-era “Shoot the Boer” song — with lyrics which include “kill the Boer, kill the white farmer” — in front of a massive crowd.
He then narrated a portion of the video showing a long row of crosses displayed alongside a road. “Those crosses represent dead white people, mostly white farmers,” Trump alleged, later adding, “Each white cross, approximately one thousand of them, represents a white farmer or their family member who was killed.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller had previously told reporters that what is happening in South Africa is the “textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.”
“This is persecution based on a protected characteristic — in this case, race. This is race-based persecution,” Miller said, as quoted by The Associated Press.
The South African government has denied allegations of genocide, and Ramaphosa said during the White House meeting that the nation’s constitution “protects the sanctity of tenure of land ownership.”
“Our constitution guarantees and protects the sanctity of tenure of land ownership, and that constitution protects all South Africans with regard to land ownership,” he said. “However, we do say, because we’ve got to deal with the past, the government, and as your government also has the right to expropriate land for public use. … We’ve never really gotten underway with that, and we are going to be doing that.”
Many humanitarian groups took issue with the mid-May resettlement of Afrikaner refugees, questioning why it was that the administration would effectively shut down the same refugee programs for vulnerable non-white refugees.
In response, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe released a letter announcing that Episcopal Migration Ministries, which oversees the denomination’s refugee resettlement programs, was ending its partnership with the U.S. government over the issue.
“I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country,” Rowe said.
“Now that we are ending our involvement in federally funded refugee resettlement, we have asked the administration to work toward a mutual agreement that will allow us to wind down all federally funded services by the end of the federal fiscal year in September.”
Wyatt told CP that he was “not necessarily in opposition to how The Episcopal Church is perceiving this.” But he noted that since his organization is not one of the nine U.S. State Department authorized resettlement agencies like Episcopal Migration Ministries or U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, WHR does not “have that burden that the agency has.”
“We’re not speaking on behalf of all Cooperative Baptists in our denomination. It’s our ministry that we do,” he continued. “The holy book just does not give God’s people an out here as far as picking and choosing.”
“That’s our position. It’s a position of faith and practice, not a political statement.”
