[Episcopal News Service] St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, has offered a community meal every Wednesday evening since the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Last week’s meal was particularly meaningful.
About 65 people gathered Oct. 30 to share chicken enchiladas, black beans and rice, mango ice cream – and to reconnect with the two refugee families that the congregation has helped resettle over the past 14 months in this Gulf Coast city of just under 19,000 people.
“It was a lovely time to come together and celebrate with new friends,” Cynthia Ramseur told Episcopal News Services. Ramseur leads a group of 15 or more volunteers from St. John’s who welcomed a Venezuelan family in September 2023 and a Nicaraguan family in July 2024 through a ministry supported by Episcopal Migration Ministries, or EMM.
St. John’s is authorized by the federal government to serve as a remote placement community partner. The localized program supplements the government’s broader work with EMM and nine other agencies to resettle more than 100,000 refugees a year in the United States who are fleeing war and persecution in their home countries.
EMM has 15 organizations across the country that serve as its affiliates to facilitate resettlement. Community partners like St. John’s are congregations and other local entities that do what the affiliates do but typically in more remote locations and on a case-by-case basis – helping one individual refugee or family at a time settle into new homes in their communities. Additional information is available on EMM’s website and by emailing emm@episcopalchurch.org.
“I’m glad to be associated with a broad community of people who care, and care globally,” Ramseur said. Welcoming these two families has been joyful work for her and her congregation. “When we said yes to this ministry, it has been daily, weekly miracles.”
EMM’s expansion of its remote placement community partnerships comes at a time of political uncertainty for refugee resettlement. The Biden administration has raised the annual maximum number of refugees allowed into the United States to 125,000. If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected Nov. 5, she is expected to maintain resettlement around current levels, which are within the normal historical range of the 44-year-old federal program. If former President Donald Trump wins a second term, he likely would reduce refugee resettlement, after previously slashing the maximum to a record low of 15,000 a year at the end of his first term.
EMM helped welcome more than 6,500 refugees in the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. Since 1980, it has resettled more than 100,000 refugees, providing a range of services for individuals and families upon their arrival in the United States, including English language and cultural orientation classes, employment services, school enrollment and initial assistance with housing and transportation.
Remote community partners like St. John’s receive federal funding of $1,100 per refugee to cover administrative costs and an additional $1,325 in direct assistance for each refugee, to help cover some of the cost of food, rent, utilities, furniture, transportation and other basic needs for those first 90 days, with a particular focus on the initial welcome period.
“The first three weeks are just really tough,” Ramseur said. “It’s a sprint and a marathon.”
Each team is notified in advance when a refugee or family has been cleared to travel to the United States, and team members are expected to welcome the new arrivals at the airport, then take them to their new home, orient them to the space and serve them a culturally appropriate first meal.
When St. John’s learned that its first refugee family would be arriving in September 2023, members of the team drove an hour and a half to the airport in New Orleans, Louisiana, to greet the family. They then brought the family back to their new home in Ocean Springs, where a meal awaited them, along with a welcome letter in Spanish signed by the whole team.
Team members, arranging for interpretation services if needed, also help the refugees with a range of initial tasks, such as scheduling a health screening, applying for short-term government assistance, seeking employment and registering children for school.
“I think it’s a marvelous program,” Lena Melton told ENS about her congregation being a community partner. Melton is a member of St. John’s resettlement team and, as a retired educator, she specializes in helping the refugee families register their children in local schools.
“I think for the two families that we have [resettled] it has worked very well,” Melton said. The adults now are all employed in the community, and the children are doing well in school. “It’s been a very positive experience, and I wish more churches or more groups would get involved and do similar things.”
Melton also enjoyed attending the recent dinner at the church and reconnecting with the two refugee families. “Everybody had a grand old time,” she said.
Helping refugees resettle in a new community can be hard work, Ramseur said, but she and her team found it a little easier this year, partly because they had grown in experience and “maybe our faith has grown a little bit” too.
With the most recent family’s initial 90-day welcome period concluded, the congregation is discerning the next phase of its ministry and whether to welcome another family in the coming year.
“This ministry of welcoming, in an environment where state public assistance is not forthcoming and transportation is difficult – the work can seem arduous, but it is equally joyful and hopeful,” Ramseur said. “We are blessed to have been part of welcoming this new family to Ocean Springs.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.