Maia Nehme, Contributing Photographer

A leading New Haven refugee resettlement agency will not receive migrants through the federal government’s refugee admissions process in the new fiscal year.

The board of directors of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, or IRIS, voted unanimously on Sept. 16 not to participate for the 2025-26 fiscal year in an international resettlement agency’s work with the Preferred Communities Program in the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to IRIS’ executive director, Maggie Mitchell Salem.

Salem said the decision came in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to classify Afrikaners, a population of Dutch-descendant white South Africans, as refugees and prioritize their resettlement while operations of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program — which partners with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to oversee refugee entry — remain otherwise suspended.

Church World Service, the international resettlement agency that oversees IRIS, had asked IRIS in early September if its members would join the agency in pledging support to refugees who enter the U.S. through the Preferred Communities Program, Salem added.

The decision marks the first time in IRIS’ 43-year history that the organization will not participate in refugee reception through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, Salem said.

“The refugee program is not about accepting people who you feel moral alignment with,” Salem said. “You may not actually agree with them on much. The point is that they’re a refugee, because they are being attacked for some aspect of who they are, and it is unsafe for them to remain in their country, and that does not apply to Afrikaners.”

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office in January, he signed an executive order indefinitely suspending new refugee admissions under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which partners with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to facilitate resettlement through agencies like IRIS. On Feb. 7, another executive order exempted Afrikaners from the suspension, classifying them as refugees.

In May, the government admitted a group of 59 Afrikaner migrants for resettlement in the United States.

The United Nations defines a refugee as a person “who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence,” and who has “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.”

Trump has alleged that Afrikaners are victims of a “genocide,” citing violent crimes against white farmers as evidence of racial discrimination. A South African court rebuked that claim, and data suggests that crime against white South Africans is not as outsized as Trump suggests, according to the country’s police minister.

“Afrikaners are not, as a group, politically persecuted,” Daniel Magaziner, a professor of South African history at Yale, said. “They are not threatened with anything approaching genocide or something that would necessitate their being seen as refugees. Most Afrikaners are able to live very free and secure lives in South Africa.”

Salem said the government offers a range of visa programs that could help bring in Afrikaner migrants, and that using refugee status to grant them a pathway to citizenship “undermines the credibility” of the admissions program.

As Trump has emphasized Afrikaner admissions, his administration has also significantly contracted federal avenues for refugee entrance into the country. Salem said that since January, IRIS has received, per month, a family of six and a “couple of individuals” as the government limited the admission of non-white refugees and slowed the processing of Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs.

Last year, IRIS resettled 900 refugees through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, Salem said. She explained that the nonprofit will continue to support the refugees it has resettled through federal admission in recent years, and that it will accept and help resettle people who successfully enter the country with SIVs, including Afghan refugees who were allies of the U.S. during the war in Afghanistan.

On Sept. 15, Salem sent an email to IRIS’ community sponsor organizations — which support resettlement throughout Connecticut beyond staff-led work in New Haven and Hartford — asking for their input on whether the nonprofit should continue its reception of refugees through the federal government.

“Would you be willing to help resettle an Afrikaner family were we to ask you for support?” Salem asked the sponsor organizations in the email, which the News obtained.

Danbury Area Refugee Assistance, or DARA, was among the sponsor groups that responded to Salem’s request for input. Barbara Davis, the president of DARA, said that her organization’s leadership unanimously voted against IRIS’ renewed partnership with the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“We didn’t feel that those families could possibly have met the same bar, the very high standard of what it means to be a refugee in the United States,” Davis said of potential Afrikaner migrants. “To shut the door on the most vulnerable populations who have survived some of the most dire circumstances in the world, only to allow in others that have not, seemed unfair, and we didn’t want to legitimize it.”

Davis explained that since Trump took office in January, DARA has “pivoted” its focus to fundraising to support IRIS in its work assisting newly-arrived families in New Haven and Hartford. IRIS lost millions of dollars in federal support for its resettlement work earlier this year.

“I always felt that the Refugee Resettlement Program was one of the most efficient and valuable public-private partnerships in this country,” Chris George, IRIS’ former executive director from 2005 to 2023, said. “We always trusted that the government would select people who meet the definition of ‘refugees.’”

The Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut founded the Interfaith Refugee Ministry, now IRIS, in 1982.