BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — When Andre Marais and his family learned last year that the Trump administration planned to welcome him and other white South Africans as refugees, he was curious but confused.
“Initially when we saw it, we were like, ‘This is strange,’ ” he said. “Like, ‘Why would someone try to protect the white guy?’ ”
But like many Afrikaners — white South Africans, generally of Dutch descent — Marais was fed up with his country’s crime, corruption, and, in his view, discrimination against its white minority.
“It’s a lawless place,” he said.
So after applying for the refugee resettlement program, Marias and 54 other Afrikaners ended up in, of all places, one of the most liberal towns in one of the most liberal states in the US.
Although it is overwhelmingly white, Brattleboro — like much of Vermont — generally reviles the very policies that brought Marais here: President Trump’s decision to end refugee programs for people of color and instead admit the descendants of those who controlled South Africa during apartheid.
That’s led to a bit of awkwardness in a place that prides itself on its welcoming ways.
“It’s tricky. I’ll put it that way,” acknowledged Joe Wiah, a Liberian refugee who now runs Brattleboro’s resettlement program.
For decades, refugees were typically placed in northwest Vermont, around Burlington, where much of the state’s population lives. But in 2021, business leaders in Brattleboro decided to establish a resettlement program in this town of 12,000, near the border with Massachusetts and New Hampshire. They saw it as an opportunity to address troubling economic trends: a stagnant and aging population that could not fill local jobs. Plus, it would bring diversity to a town that was more than 92 percent white.
The decision coincided with the United States’ precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Over the next four years, around 650 Afghans moved to Vermont, many to Brattleboro, Bennington, and surrounding towns along the southern border of the state, according to the Vermont Afghan Alliance.
“The community responded beautifully,” said Paul Gallagher, cochair of the Brattleboro-based St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Refugee Ministry, which organized volunteers to support the new arrivals.
But the day Trump returned to office last year, he suspended the refugee resettlement program, which had brought more than 100,000 people to the US the previous year, largely from impoverished, war-torn, majority-Muslim nations. Weeks later, the president granted a single exception: for Afrikaners, who he said were victims of “white genocide,” a widely debunked claim.
“It was malicious because it was just so false,” Gallagher said. “They do not meet the definition of a refugee.”
Higher powers seemed to agree. In May 2025, the Episcopal Church announced it would no longer work with the federal government to resettle refugees, citing the “preferential treatment” Afrikaners would receive over others. Gallagher’s local ministry followed suit, deciding not to sponsor any Afrikaner families moving to Brattleboro.
The agencies charged with finding homes and jobs for refugees faced a tougher decision because their funding is tied to the number of people they resettle.
“If we had said no, we would be shut down and could not serve the folks who are already here,” said Wiah, director of ECDC Vermont, which resettles refugees in the southern part of the state. “That would have undermined everything. The hope is to keep it going and that one day things are going to change.”
By the end of September, Wiah expects his group to have resettled as many as 70 Afrikaners in Brattleboro. Another 38 have been placed in northwest Vermont with support from another agency, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, according to Zeze Rwasama, its director of refugee services. Over the last year, a total of about 12,900 refugees have been resettled throughout the US, according to the State Department. And most of them are from South Africa.
Jack Rossiter-Munley, who previously ran ECDC Vermont’s office in Bennington, said he believes the resettlement agencies were wrong to take part in what he views as “a discriminatory policy.”
“By participating in that program, you are signing on to an ideological project through the highest levels of the federal government rather than living out your community’s values,” he said, calling the policy “deeply hurtful” to the non-Afrikaner refugees in Vermont whose family members are still stranded abroad.
Among them are Afghans who qualified for a special visa program designed for those who supported the US government during its 20-year war in their country and faced retaliation when the Taliban returned to power in 2021. That program continued through much of last year, but Trump suspended it in November, after an Afghan visa-holder was charged with shooting two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., killing one of them.
“I would say the vast majority of Afghans who resettled in Vermont are here without family members,” said Ellen Yount, executive director of the Vermont Afghan Alliance. “It’s heartbreaking.”
The Trump administration’s Afrikaners-only policy is “plainly racial discrimination,” according to Mevlüde Akay Alp, senior staff attorney for the International Refugee Assistance Program, which has sued to reverse it. She pointed to guidance from a senior State Department official that it is intended only for white people.
Tracy Dolan, director of the State Refugee Office, said she found Trump’s changes to the program “shocking,” but she has urged community groups to nevertheless support Afrikaners who arrive in Vermont.
“We need to welcome everyone who comes through, even when they come through a federal policy that we don’t agree with,” she said.
Five Afrikaners who spoke with the Globe said their moves to Brattleboro had been largely positive. They quickly found work and apartments, and were connecting with one another at the occasional braai, the South African equivalent of a barbecue.
“The people are just so amazing,” said Morne Breytenbach, who moved from Cape Town to Brattleboro in June. “They’re all very accepting, very friendly, very approachable, willing to help.”
Breytenbach, 51, has a full-time job as a safety officer at the local high school and a part-time job as a dispatcher at the county sheriff’s department.
“Finding work was one of the easiest things,” he said. “The culture is not very different from the Afrikaner culture back home. I didn’t find it really hard to adjust.”
Those who spoke described similar reasons for applying for refugee status. Letitia Nel, who lived in a rural region near South Africa’s border with Eswatini, said her house was robbed and her husband denied a promotion because he is white. So the family, which includes two 17-year-olds and an 8-year-old, moved to Vermont in June.
“The reason I came here is for the children,” Nel said. “In South Africa, I don’t see any future for them.”
Indeed, the country has among the highest rates of violent crime in the world. But according to the Institute for Security Studies, a Pretoria-based research organization, white South Africans are statistically less at risk than other racial groups. About half the country’s murders take place in just 12 percent of its precincts, most of which are predominantly Black.
“We’re not saying these people don’t have horrific tales to tell,” said Lizette Lancaster, head of the Institute’s justice and violence prevention program. “We’re just saying they’re not necessarily more aggrieved or more targeted than others.”
Breytenbach said he had been alarmed by stories he’d heard about gangs raiding farms at night and torturing and killing their occupants. Trump and his former adviser, South African native Elon Musk, have invoked similar stories in arguing that there is a “white genocide” taking place in the country.
But farm murders account for just 0.2 percent of the overall murder rate, according to the Institute for Security Studies, and are generally motivated by robbery, not racial animus.
“All the evidence shows that it’s not a real thing,” Lancaster said of the white genocide allegation.
Lancaster, who is herself an Afrikaner, said she understands that it can be difficult for those who used to belong to a privileged minority to reckon with their new status in post-apartheid South Africa. The country’s Black Economic Empowerment policies do, by definition, give Black employees and businesses a leg up. But white Afrikaners nevertheless remain “disproportionately more advantaged than their Black counterparts” due to persistent disparities in wealth and education, she said.
In Lancaster’s view, Afrikaners do not meet the United Nations’ definition of a refugee: a person forced to flee their country due to persecution, war, or violence.
“There is no evidence to suggest that they are particularly targeted,” she said.
Brattleboro’s Afrikaners appear ambivalent about the term “refugee.”
“By definition, I am,” Breytenbach said. “But I don’t feel like one.”
He took a circuitous route to refugee status, having lived in Dubai and worked for Emirates airline for more than two decades. Only after he reached the mandatory retirement age of 50 did he apply for the refugee program and return to South Africa for six months as his application was being processed.
Marais and his wife, Barbara Lugar, said they were doing fine financially when they left home, in a rural area outside Pretoria, with their 18-year-old daughter. They owned a house and two cars. Lugar, 47, worked for a company that builds armored vehicles and Marais, 36, worked in IT.
But they haven’t yet sold their home and couldn’t bring much with them to Brattleboro.
“It’s like starting from scratch,” Lugar said.
She said she didn’t feel like a refugee until a week after arriving in Vermont, when it dawned on her that the crime she was accustomed to was not present here.
“It’s so strange to be somewhere where you’re safe,” she said. “After I got here, I realized it wasn’t normal to live like we lived.”
Marais said he sees himself as a refugee because he’s so far from home, but he avoids labeling himself as such when he meets new people.
“I’m trying to assimilate as much as possible,” he said. “I guess I just want to be treated the same way everyone else is treated here. I don’t need any special treatment.”
Still, he doesn’t think much of those who suggest Afrikaners shouldn’t qualify for refugee status.
“I’d invite them to go live in South Africa for six months,” he said.
Lugar has met Afghan refugees in classes she’s taken in town. She said she sympathizes with their plight and thinks their loved ones, too, should qualify for refugee status.
“I think it should be open to everybody to make it fair, to have a chance,” she said. “Everybody should have a chance to make their life better.”
Paul Heintz can be reached at paul.heintz@globe.com. Follow him on X @paulheintz.