Update on Refugee Resettlement
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Dear Friend,
Imagine arriving in a new country with nothing but hope—and finding out the very programs meant to support you are disappearing.
That’s the reality facing thousands of refugees in our communities after federal funding cuts earlier this year forced us to reduce our refugee resettlement workforce by 50%. In just six months, we had supported over 5,000 individuals—and then lost the resources to serve them fully.
And yet, we remain—still walking alongside new Americans in Atlanta, Savannah, Birmingham, and Nashville. Because of you, we’re able to keep showing up when it matters most.
With donations from supporters like you, we're actively working to provide thousands of refugees in our region with:
Employment Placement Services
Child & Youth Services
Economic Empowerment Supports
Emergency Needs Assistance (Rent, Utilities, Food)
Our resources are limited presently but every gift makes a big difference for the family it helps.
UPDATE ON REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT: We have recently received communications from our federal resettlement partners that refugee resettlement may reopen soon to a limited number of refugees whose prior travel plans were canceled earlier this year, as well as to a number of Afghan allies who may start arriving soon. Thank you for standing with us as we remain committed to this important work.
Two families resettled in Alabama were recently featured by the Washington Post in a story we'd like to share with you. Please consider donating today to support families like the Mehraz family, who still need our accompaniment services in order to thrive despite government funding cuts.
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Two refugee families. Two very different experiences under Trump.
The Langtons from South Africa were given a fast track to refugee status in America. The Mehraz family from Myanmar is struggling after cuts to refugee resettlement agencies.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — After years of living in a makeshift hut at a refugee camp in the woods of Bangladesh, Shom Mehraz boarded an airplane for the first time in her life and flew across the world to this city in August.
She and her family had endured the unthinkable in Myanmar. Military officers kidnapped and raped young women in their village. Neighbors were rounded up and shot to death before their very eyes in what has been internationally recognized as a genocide. They told the officials who spent over two years vetting them as refugees about how their home had been burned to the ground.
Thousands of miles away in South Africa, Errol Langton had also experienced violence firsthand. Decades earlier, he said, he had been stabbed 15 times by a Black intruder in his home. He believes the crime is part of a pattern of attacks on Afrikaners like himself, though there is no evidence of a broader campaign of targeted violence against White farmers.
The road to becoming refugees took both families to Birmingham, Alabama. But that is where the two families’ similarities end.
When President Donald Trump took office, he suspended the U.S. refugee program, preventing many people facing persecution from entering the United States. But in February, his administration offered refugee status to Afrikaners for the first time. Langton immediately logged onto his computer and submitted his application to the U.S. Embassy. He arrived here three months later.
Now, both are being resettled by Inspiritus, a refugee resettlement nonprofit that has helped thousands of people rebuild their lives in the South. The president paused or reduced funding for agencies assisting refugees in the U.S. after taking office. As a result, Inspiritus has cut more than 50 percent of its refugee-serving staff. It has also had to scale back programs that help refugees with urgent medical needs.
Inspiritus is using what remains of its funds to help both refugees who arrived before Trump’s inauguration and the South African family that landed in Alabama in May.
For Mehraz’s family, those cuts have added to their struggles. Nobody in the family speaks fluent English. They don’t understand the bills arriving in the mail and are finding it hard to afford groceries. They are largely relying on a volunteer group associated with their mosque to conduct basic tasks like getting their children enrolled in school.
Langton and his family speak fluent English and are hoping to establish a farm in the U.S. like the one they had in South Africa. The father of four children said he has been working with the Inspiritus staff to secure housing and employment.
His family’s arrival as part of the first group of Afrikaners admitted into the country as refugees has added to criticism of Trump’s immigration policies. Many in the world of refugee resettlement are questioning why the president would block thousands of largely non-White immigrants fleeing situations of war and mass killings from trying to enter the U.S. while allowing in Afrikaners.
In a dramatic Oval Office meeting last month between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump reiterated baseless claims that White Afrikaners have been victims of a genocide, despite a recent South African court ruling that said White genocide in the country was “clearly imagined and not real.” Ramaphosa and several South African officials there acknowledged that violence was a concern, but they pushed back on the idea that it could be drawn along racial lines.
Mehraz and Langton do not know each other. Mehraz said through an interpreter that her family was simply happy to be in the U.S. And Langton said he was glad Trump was shining a spotlight on the challenges for people like him. But the contrast between the two is not lost among those trying to help in Birmingham.
“These programs are made for people who are running away, hiding in bathrooms so they don’t get raped, living under gunfire, living with flies and fleas for months and years trying to fend for themselves,” said Hazem Abouhouli, a volunteer assisting refugee families in Birmingham. “There’s a big difference.”
From Bangladesh to Birmingham
Myanmar’s armed forces began escalating their attacks on Mehraz’s village in 2017, in what the government called “clearance operations” — a mass slaughter of the Rohingya people in reaction to attacks by rebel groups. In the nation also known as Burma, military officers massacred at least 10,000 people of the Muslim minority, burned down more than 300 villages and raped scores of women.
Mehraz with her son, Abu Juhar, age 7. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Mehraz worried for her husband and seven children. The family shuttled their teenage daughter from one relative’s home to another in hopes that the officers wouldn’t know where to find her. She and other young women in the community tried to make their skin look darker by rubbing coal across their bodies. They knew the soldiers tended to target girls who were lighter skinned.
Mehraz’s husband is disabled, but they tried to make ends meet by growing their own food and raising chickens and goats. No one in the family has a formal education. She said they often fished in a nearby canal to help feed the children. The violence in their community was so rampant, they said, that one day they arrived and found the water red with blood.
Not long after, Mehraz and her family decided to leave, joining an exodus of nearly 1 million Rohingya people fleeing to Bangladesh.
After more than a week of walking, they arrived at a forest that today houses the largest international refugee camp in the world. They settled in Unchiprang, or Camp 22, which holds more than 24,000 refugees as of April. For four years, they survived off what they could find in the woods and handouts from aid groups.
Then, in early 2021, an international human rights organization began vetting them for resettlement as refugees in another country.
The family spent hours recounting their trauma, they said. Over the next two years, they attended at least five meetings at which officials checked their stories, took their fingerprints and made sure they were up-to-date on vaccines. In 2023, they finally received good news: The U.S. would take them in.
“I was so happy,” said Mehraz, whose interpreter, Jillur Rahim, is a volunteer for the Refugee Support Team, an informal group of volunteers in Birmingham. The only thing she had heard about the U.S., she said, was that it’s a big country. Their refugee camp has a higher population density than some of the most densely populated cities in the world. Anywhere with space sounded like heaven.
A year later, the family boarded a plane to the U.S. At that point they’d been at the refugee camp for seven years and spent much of it in the refugee application process. For reasons unknown to them or the volunteers who help them, they were assigned to resettle in Birmingham.
Shom Mehraz, seen at the door, with her resettled family in Birmingham, Alabama. They are seeing diminished help due to the Trump administration’s cuts to refugee assistance in the area — after escaping brutal killings, rapes and persecution in Myanmar. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
A ‘Black apartheid’
Langton grew up on a farm in South Africa. When he was around 17, he said, robbers attacked his family’s shop near their home. He wasn’t there at the time, but he said one of the men hit his mother with a pistol. The assailants rounded up his relatives and employees and stole their belongings.
Years later, when Langton was in his mid-20s, a man broke into his home and stabbed him 15 times. Langton said the man was on top of him and jabbed him near his collarbone. He managed to push him off. He never learned the motive, he said, but he believes the incident to be part of a pattern.
“Apartheid was a terrible, despicable thing. … I was never involved, I never partook,” said Langton, now 48. “But the same thing is happening now. It’s still apartheid — it’s Black apartheid.” He cautioned that he doesn’t believe all White or Black South Africans are to blame for the problems of the past or what he is trying to draw attention to now.
Black people and other racial minorities were segregated, not allowed to vote and denied other basic rights during the nearly five decades of apartheid in South Africa. Langton emphasized that it was White people who voted to end apartheid in a referendum. But, he said, “nobody wants to tell that story.”
He pointed to current initiatives like Black Economic Empowerment that are aimed at addressing historic inequities as proof of what he described as a “modern apartheid.” The policy offers funding and resources for Black business owners that he said puts White people like himself at a disadvantage.
Experts and studies on wealth and power distribution in South Africa do not support the idea that Afrikaners are at a disadvantage. In 2017, a government audit found that White South Africans owned nearly three-quarters of the country’s land, while making up only seven percent of the population. A 2023 study found that the typical Black households have 5 percent of the wealth of White households.
Errol Langton is one of 59 Afrikaners who came to the U.S. about three months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order granting the South Africans refugee status. (Courtesy of Errol Langton)
South Africa does not release crime statistics based on race, which makes it difficult to identify killings of White farmers. Official police data shows 12 people were slain on farms between October and December 2024 — a period during which 6,953 people were killed in the country. South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, the data shows, and has been plagued by violent crime for decades.
In the Oval Office meeting, John Steenhuisen, the minister of agriculture in South Africa, who Ramaphosa pointed out is White, said there are problems that South Africa needs to address when it comes to the safety of farmers. He described it as a “rural safety problem.”
Jonathan Jansen, a professor of education at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, said those attacks are not driven by race.
“They’re being attacked because of their isolation,” he said. “Farms are in rural areas — they’re fairly isolated from the main highways, the main cities — and so robbers see this as a place where they can rip off people.”
Langton, who grew Swiss chard, mustard leaf and other greens, was also involved with local government. He kept close tabs on the news and applied for refugee status the same day the email address for Afrikaners’ application submissions became public. In the application, he recounted the violence he says he experienced. Langton said the process involved three hours-long interviews.
He applied on Feb. 12 and arrived at Dulles International Airport outside of D.C. — exactly three months later.
Langton, his wife and four children, including his eldest daughter’s husband and children, were greeted by journalists and Trump administration officials. Several of the Afrikaners, some holding small children, stood together waving American flags.
“When you have quality seeds, you can put them in foreign soil and they will blossom,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said. “They will bloom. And we are excited to welcome you here to our country, where we think you will bloom.”
Refugee children in Mehraz’s family play in an apartment in Birmingham. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
‘Happy that I’m here’
Recently, Mehraz got a letter in the mail and didn’t know what it was. She took it to the Birmingham Islamic Society, which has become a focal point of support for the family. It was a phone bill. Inspiritus had handled those payments, and the family cannot read or write in their language — much less in English.
Immediate concerns like these are all they have time to dwell on. Mehraz’s daughter, Ramida Begum, now a mother with three children, said she has fewer nightmares about the horrors of Myanmar and Bangladesh and more about the mounting bills her family cannot pay.
“I worry about what will happen in the future,” Begum said.
The International Organization for Migration arranged for their travel to the U.S., but the flights were not free. Collectively, they said they owe around $14,000 for their transportation to Alabama.
The extended family of 13 lives in apartments in Hoover, a Birmingham suburb that’s minutes away from the Islamic society where they go to pray. Their apartment has no paintings or decoration, just two large couches, a table and a TV that still has packaging tape on it — all donated.
For refugees such as Mehraz and her family who were already in the U.S. when Trump became president, there are longer wait times for services, fewer people to help and less dollars to distribute where the need is greatest, said John Moeller, chief executive of Inspiritus.
“We are in a season of austerity, so we’re spreading the peanut butter just a little bit thinner to make sure we help everybody,” he said.
That’s where the Islamic society and Refugee Support Team step in.
“We get increased calls from people because Inspiritus used to have a hired, paid person who takes care of renewing food stamps, Medicaid, makes appointments … and now they don’t have that support,” said Abouhouli, a member of the refugee team who came to the U.S. with a student visa and is now a U.S. citizen.
Rahim, the other volunteer, recalled a recent night when the family called him at 2 a.m. The children were sick and the family had made it to the emergency room, but they needed an interpreter. Rahim stayed on the phone for over an hour helping them communicate with the doctors.
They used to just need him for moments like that — emergencies. But not since Trump’s funding freeze and reduction of refugee programs.
“Now they need the support everywhere,” he said.
After months of searching, Begum’s husband finally got a job in construction, and he and his boss communicate through body language. Some of the extended family’s nine young children are old enough to be in school and have learned to count up to 100 and say a few English phrases.
Mehraz was not aware of the Afrikaners who had come to the U.S. When Rahim explained the politics and news around it to her, she said simply: “I don’t know what to make of it, I’m just happy that I’m here.”
While the Islamic community members and volunteers work overtime to fill the gaps for the refugees, Langton described coordinating with a caseworker who is trying to help him find a job. He wants to be a farmer, he said, like he was in South Africa. He said that landing in the middle of Alabama has been disorienting.
When asked whether he thinks the refugee program should be restored, Langton said he felt it wasn’t for him to say. Like the Mehraz family, he said he was just grateful to be in Birmingham. “And without being selfish,” he added, “I kind of need to, you know, put my oxygen mask on first.”
Courtesy of The Washington Post.
Thank you for your ongoing interest and support in this important work.
Sincerely,
Virginia Spencer
Chief Development Officer
Inspiritus
