World Relief Responds to Arrival of Afrikaners to the United States

Contact: wr@pinkston.co

(Baltimore, MD) May 9, 2025 – Next week, the Trump administration will welcome to the United States a small number of individuals and families from the Afrikaner ethnic minority group of South Africa whom it has designated as refugees. These individuals are not being processed through the traditional U.S. Refugee Admissions Program — the longstanding public-private partnership process operated by the U.S. State Department along with non-profit organizations such as World Relief — because that program remains suspended following a day-one executive order from President Trump. Instead, the Trump administration has designated these new arrivals to be eligible for support services funded by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), funding that already provides support for hundreds of thousands of refugees resettled previously to the U.S., individuals granted asylum and individuals with approved Special Immigrant Visas, among others.

World Relief has been assigned a small number of these new Afrikaner arrivals as a part of our longstanding partnership with the ORR, and we will serve them with the same compassion and respect we serve others, rooted in our biblical convictions. Last fiscal year, these funds enabled World Relief to serve tens of thousands of individuals, including individuals who fled persecution on account of their faith, those threatened by the Taliban because of their service to the U.S. military, refugees resettled after living for decades in camp settings and many others. 

World Relief’s mission is “to boldly engage the world’s greatest crises in partnership with the church.” While World Relief has never had a role in determining which individuals are designated overseas for refugee resettlement, we have found that our participation in the U.S. refugee resettlement program for nearly half a century has aligned closely with our mission. In recent years, for example, the vast majority of refugees newly resettled by World Relief were from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Burma and Venezuela, all countries that we believe are among the world’s greatest humanitarian crises.  

“We remain gravely concerned with the sustained suspension of the State Department’s refugee resettlement initial resettlement process, which has abandoned thousands of refugees who have fled the world’s greatest crises. We hope the administration will put as much energy into restarting a robust program targeting people fleeing the world’s greatest crises as they have toward this relatively small population.” said Myal Greene, president and CEO of World Relief. 

Roughly 40 million people globally are refugees, having fled their homelands because of a well-founded fear of persecution. Polls consistently find that evangelical Christians, like Americans overall, want the United States to offer refuge to those fleeing persecution for reasons such as their religion, their race, their peaceful political opposition to tyrannical regimes and the service to the U.S. military abroad. 

In recent weeks, we’ve had tens of thousands of sign-ons to a Christian statement calling on the administration “to sustain the U.S. refugee resettlement program.”  Last week, leaders from conservative Christian organizations such as Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and The Family Leader called the U.S. refugee resettlement program “one of the most essential tools the United States has historically used to uphold religious freedom,” having “offered a lifeline to those escaping religious oppression, from Soviet Jews to Iraqi Yezidis to Christians in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Burma and other countries that persecute followers of Jesus.” World Relief urges the administration to heed these voices. 

“We’re pleading with the administration to fully reopen the U.S. refugee resettlement program, with a focus on prioritizing the most vulnerable in the midst of a global displacement crisis,” added Greene.