Maine will resettle only 50 people through the federal refugee program over the next year, all of them white South Africans.
That’s according to Inza Ouattara, state refugee coordinator through Catholic Charities Maine, who said last year the state resettled close to 500 refugees.
“That’s way below, you know, what we were expecting last fiscal year,” he said.
Outtara said Maine is also down to one federally-approved resettlement agency, the Lewiston-based Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services, which he said will handle all 50 new arrivals this year.
“Because of the small number, I don’t see any major challenge that Maine will have in resettling refugees,” Ouattara said.
In recent years, new refugees in Maine have mostly come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Somalia, and other countries experiencing war and armed conflict.
President Donald Trump, however, is prioritizing Afrikaners, a white South African ethnic group that he claims is facing persecution, a notion South African leaders have strongly rejected.
The Trump administration last week announced it was capping refugee admissions at 7,500 hundred over the next year, a 94% decrease from last year’s cap.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
