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The Episcopal Church is ending its refugee resettlement partnership with the federal government over the Trump administration’s “preferential treatment” of white South Africans whom Donald Trump has baselessly claimed have been targeted by “genocide.”
Presiding Episcopal Bishop Sean Rowe announced Monday in a statement that the church was calling it quits on a joint program with the federal government, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a taxpayer-funded charter flight and were warmly greeted by a Trump administration State Department delegation.
“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step” of helping the white South Africa immigrants, Rowe wrote.
“Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.”
It has been “painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” he wrote.
Rowe noted that the “previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program” in which the church was active has already “essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain,” he noted.
“As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins … and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s refugee resettlement program and investing our resources in serving migrants in other ways.”
White South Africans, descended from the largely Dutch Afrikaners who immigrated to South Africa centuries ago, long held an elevated status over native Black residents. The Afrikaners imposed the brutally discriminatory apartheid policies until they ended in 1990 that kept a small minority in control of the country, to the suffering and impoverishment of the Black majority.
To this day white farmers continue to own roughly 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country even though white South Africans make up only about 7 percent of the population.
Earlier this year Trump promised a “rapid” whites-only “pathway to citizenship” for the Afrikaners after he was reportedly pressed on the issue by tech billionaire and DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk, who was born and raised in apartheid South Africa.
Rowe wasn’t only upset about Trump’s fast-tracking American citizenship for white South Africans.
“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 also wrote.
Trump’s favored white South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who have been undergoing years of vetting and processing. The Afrikaners also seemed somehow about to leap-frog even other foreign green-card holders, many of whom have been deported by Trump administration orders.
Episcopal Migration Ministries has long resettled refugees under federal grants. Rowe said that government officials contacted the church last month and said that it expected the ministry to resettle some of the South Africans.
South Africa’s government has strongly denied Donald Trump’s allegations of discriminatory treatment of its white minority residents, and considers the claims of “genocide” against them preposterous.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
