By Rev. Dr. Wes Magruder, CWS Wilmington Office Director
Imagine you’re at home one evening, sitting comfortably in your living room. Suddenly, you hear someone pounding on your front door, crying out for help.
You rush to the door and glance out the window to see what is happening. You see a young woman screaming for you to open the door. She keeps looking behind her in fear and horror.
When you look past her, you see an enormous alligator coming up your drive, headed to your front door.
It likely wouldn’t take you very long to make the decision to open the door and allow the young woman to enter your house, quickly slamming the door back on the advancing reptile.
This seems like the right thing to do, the humane action in the face of impending danger. In the moment of crisis, you wouldn’t ask further questions. You wouldn’t try to ascertain whether she “deserved” your assistance or whether she “provoked” the alligator’s attack.
Likewise, you wouldn’t send her back out the front door as long as the risk remained. It wouldn’t matter who she was or where she came from; to turn her back out of the house while the alligator lingered in your driveway would be a crime against humanity.
This scenario illustrates the international principle of non-refoulement, the core of the 1951 Refugee Convention of the United Nations, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. “Refouler” is a French word which means “to push or force back.”
The specific language in the 1951 policy (Article 33.1) reads as follows:
No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any
manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom
would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, member-
ship of a particular social group or political opinion.
Non-refoulement is a foundational international law of human rights, yet we are seeing that hundreds of thousands of people are presently being forced back into the jaws of the alligator.
To begin with, the US Refugee Admissions Program which has successfully resettled hundreds of thousands of refugees over the past 40+ years has been shuttered since January 2025, leaving large numbers of refugees in an uncomfortable limbo.
People have also been turned away from the United States without asylum hearings, while others have been kept far from our borders where they might be able to make a claim for protection. In other words, it’s not “refoulement” if people never even make it close enough to be pushed back.
Meanwhile, protected statuses have been terminated for large numbers of Haitians, Cubans, and Ukrainians who were all granted permission to take shelter in the US as conditions deteriorated in their home countries. As these policies take hold, all sorts of people are pushed back into harm’s way.
CWS Wilmington was opened in late 2022 to serve refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants who had escaped from danger, giving them new hope and opportunity in the Cape Fear region. Though our work as a partner of the US Refugee Admission Program has come to an end, our commitment to serve our newest neighbors remains steadfast.
Last month on Ash Wednesday, the national CWS organization announced a new campaign – Rise Up for Refuge, a “movement-building initiative designed to mobilize, resource, and connect the growing wave of nonviolent action transforming communities across the country” organizing to equip, uplift and support immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, green card holders, and even naturalized citizens.
As a local office of CWS, we are proud to participate in this campaign and are making plans to mobilize this effort in the Cape Fear region. In particular, CWS Wilmington will focus on raising a moral voice of opposition to increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric and action in an effort to persuade people of faith to become active in peaceful resistance measures.
We intend to make the moral case that it is our moral and theological responsibility, as people of faith, to provide refuge for those who seek it. If you would like to know more and want to join this campaign, subscribe to https://cwswilmington.substack.com.