Maine will receive only 50 refugees this year under record-low restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on the federal resettlement program — and all of them are expected to be white South Africans.
That’s a 95% reduction from 950 refugees initially allocated to Maine last year, and a 90% reduction from 490 refugees who actually were allowed to come here after President Donald Trump took office in January.
This is the first time white South Africans, or Afrikaners, have been resettled in Maine — a state without a significant population of white South African immigrants, said Inza Ouatarra, state refugee program coordinator with Catholic Charities Maine.
“We call these cases ‘free’ cases because they have no anchor community here,” Ouatarra said Monday.
Exactly when the Afrikaners will arrive, where they will be settled and how long they might stay in Maine is unclear. Refugees are allowed to move elsewhere once they complete the initial 90-day resettlement process.
Ouatarra said he didn’t expect major challenges in resettling the Afrikaners, most of whom speak both Afrikaans and English. The process will be handled by Maine’s only federally approved resettlement agency, Maine Immigrant & Refugee Services in Lewiston.
In recent years, Maine has welcomed refugees from a variety of African, Middle Eastern, South Asian and other countries. A refugee is someone who can show they were persecuted or feared persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
Catholic Charities is one of three agencies in the state that assist refugees. Refugees are typically outside the U.S. when they are screened and accepted for resettlement, whereas asylum seekers apply when they are at a U.S. port of entry or in the country already.
At the start of this year, the agency planned to resettle around 1,300 refugees. But that changed in January, when the Trump administration instituted a broad freeze on refugee resettlement and foreign aid in January.
In a presidential notice published last month, refugee admissions were capped at 7,500 for the budget year starting Oct. 1 — a 94% decrease from last year’s ceiling of 125,000 set by the Biden administration.
The notice states that the admissions will be allocated primarily to Afrikaners from South Africa “who are victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as well as “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”
This is a record low refugee admissions cap — the previous was set in 2020 during the first Trump administration, when it allowed 15,000 refugees in fiscal year 2021.
In the past two years, the largest groups have arrived from Afghanistan, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with most settling in Lewiston, followed by Portland. None have been Afrikaners, who were not classified as refugees until February.
In 2018, during his first term, Trump directed his secretary of state to investigate reports that the South African government was seizing land from white farmers. His rhetoric drew criticism from experts, who noted that while white South Africans make up just 7% of the population, they still control roughly 70% of the country’s commercial farmland.
This story includes reporting by the Associated Press and will be updated.