By Kristina Cooke and Ted Hesson
APPLETON, Wisconsin (Reuters) – On a fall Sunday in the U.S. election battleground state of Wisconsin, Masomo Rugama and fellow Congolese community members danced and sang to worship songs in their native Kinyamulenge. The women donned colorful dresses, the men mostly suits. Small children in their Sunday best ran up and down the aisles. They prayed for a good outcome in the presidential election.
This Congolese church is one of several in the city of Appleton that have sprung up to serve a growing number of refugees who have settled there after fleeing the war-torn African nation.
Rugama, 31, came to the United States in 2016 after six years in a refugee camp in Uganda. It was just months before Donald Trump would win the presidency and decimate the refugee resettlement program that had legally brought him there.
Rugama, who became a U.S. citizen in 2022, is new to American politics but is keenly aware that Trump has repeatedly painted Congolese immigrants as formerly imprisoned criminals – despite any evidence of widespread criminality among them – and is expected to again greatly reduce entries of refugees from abroad.
Rugama gives Trump the benefit of the doubt. “I think, maybe, he has never met a Congolese,” he said.
Rugama’s brother and sister, his nieces and nephews as well as his mother-in-law are still waiting in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya hoping to complete the long vetting process for resettlement. They are watching the U.S. presidential election campaign that sees Trump up against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris from afar, he said, wondering what the outcome could mean for their hopes to resettle there.
While the refugee resettlement program has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in the past, Trump has portrayed it as a security vulnerability. The difference between the two candidates on the issue could not be more stark.
Trump is expected to temporarily suspend the U.S. refugee admissions program and then slash refugee entries if reelected, mirroring what he did during his 2017-2021 presidency.
Trump’s first-term efforts to clamp down on refugees, reducing the admissions cap to a record low 15,000, was part of a broader effort to restrict both legal and illegal immigration that he has pledged to take even further if he wins. The inflammatory rhetoric on immigrants has also been uncomfortable for some conservative pastors, who point to the Bible’s call to care for the refugee.
“Congo, Africa, just released a lot of people, a lot of people from their prisons and jails and brought them into the United States of America,” Trump said at a May press conference. There is no evidence for this claim.
Asked about his plans for refugees, the Trump campaign said in a statement that the Biden administration had “unconscionably abused our refugee and asylum systems” and that Trump would “restore his effective immigration policies” and implement “brand new crackdowns.”
It has taken President Joe Biden’s administration nearly four years to ramp the refugee program back up as the deep cuts during Trump’s time in office meant resettlement organizations had to reduce staff and dismantle infrastructure that took time to rebuild.
But last fiscal year, the U.S. resettled more refugees – 100,000 – than it has in 30 years. Of those, Congolese made up the largest nationality, with around 20,000 resettled, according to U.S. State Department data.
The prospect of his relatives’ cases being delayed worries Rugama, who is sending them money he earns as a team lead at Nestle to support them as they wait.
Rugama is a member of the Banyamulenge, a tribe in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo that has long faced discrimination and violence due to their ethnic link to Rwanda’s Tutsi community. During Congolese elections last year, the Banyamulenge faced hate speech and voter suppression.
“We come from a place of war, where we were discriminated against,” he said. “We don’t want to see discrimination.”
Rugama will be voting for the first time in the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election in Wisconsin, one of the seven battleground states that could decide the presidency. Trump lost the state to Biden, a Democrat, by about 21,000 votes in 2020 and polls show a tight race against Harris. Outagamie County, a Republican-leaning area where Appleton is located, went for Trump in 2020 and 2016 but backed Democrat Barack Obama in 2008.
At a different Congolese church in Appleton, Mia Mukendi, 34, pushed her 3-month-old baby out of a service. Mukendi, who came to the U.S. in 2016 as a refugee, said she was hurt by Trump’s comments. “It’s crazy, it’s not true. He hates people for no reason.” Now a U.S. citizen, she said she was voting for Harris.
Her pastor, Robert Mutombo, said Trump’s remarks about the Congo had been shared widely in local Congolese WhatsApp messaging groups.
Some people, he said, thought it was simply campaign bombast or Trump was given wrong information. Others were worried about possible fallout from the rhetoric. Everyone remembered his prior actions on refugees.
“Even myself being a Congolese, I may feel ashamed to say somewhere that I am Congolese, because everyone would think ‘Oh, these are the guys that President Trump was talking about,'” Mutombo said.
At a recent event Mutombo attended with several evangelical pastors, another pastor apologized to him for Trump’s comments, he said.
This month, several hundred conservative evangelical Christian leaders and pastors across the country signed an open letter to both candidates that urged them to avoid “offensive” dehumanizing language about immigrants.
The letter also cited a January 2024 poll by Lifeway Research that found more than two thirds of evangelicals believe the United States has a moral responsibility to accept refugees.
Joel Zeiner, lead pastor at Christ the Rock church in the Appleton area, said he signed the letter because the partisanship and rhetoric around refugees worried him.
After several members asked the church to talk about issues in the election, he put together a series of sermons called “the politics of Jesus” in which he suggested people think twice about putting out yard signs, for example, to avoid alienating others in the community.
“The message was lead with your faith, lead with your identity as a follower of Jesus and be very careful how you express your political identity,” Zeiner said. “Love God with all your mind and your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
He said that for some church members this message was “challenging.”
Last Sunday, after giving an impassioned sermon about thankfulness, Pastor Mutombo headed home to get ready for his night shift as a machine operator in a cheese factory.
