CLARKSTON, Ga. (RNS) — Soon after Muzhda Oriakhil and her husband came to the U.S. from Afghanistan in 2014, they settled in Clarkston, a small but thriving city outside Atlanta known as the “Ellis Island of the South” for the tens of thousands of refugees who have resettled there. 

It was not an easy path. Without transportation, insurance or easy access to medical care, she lost her first pregnancy. Oriakhil has spent the past 12 years trying to make that landing easier for others. She is now a senior community engagement manager at Friends of Refugees, a faith-based organization that offers refugees adapting to American life a host of services, including healthy-mom classes and mom circles.

Now she worries for the 300 moms who take part in the nonprofit’s initiatives for expectant mothers. The eight-week healthy-mom classes, which include throwing the moms a baby shower and offering postpartum support, used to draw 30 women. Now only 10 are enrolled.

Terrified of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, families have retreated indoors — keeping children home from school, avoiding neighbors, cutting off the outside world, at least among newer arrivals who have yet to secure U.S. citizenship.

“There are not any positive words to give them hope, except we say, ‘We are with you. We are here,’” Oriakhil said. “But the real questions never get answered, because that is out of our control.” 

As the U.S. turns away from welcoming immigrants to deporting them, leaders in Clarkston and the Atlanta area are strategizing how to best protect what they’ve built.

Since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, at least 60,000 refugees from as many as 60 different countries have resettled in Clarkston. Just 12 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, the bedroom community is considered one of the most diverse square miles in the country. The foreign-born population of Clarkston is nearly 40%, according to last year’s U.S. Census estimate. In 1990, it was 9%. 

Clarkston made efforts to welcome refugees, at first grudgingly, later willingly, providing a model of inclusion for the rest of the country. A Jordanian woman started a soccer league for refugee youth — a story that became a bestselling 2009 book. A woman who is married to a pastor opened a nonprofit coffee shop that hires and trains refugees as baristas. Churches and nonprofits started a pregnancy health care clinic. A nonprofit bought 2 acres of land for a community garden where refugees could rent small plots to grow their own vegetables.

In 2014, Clarkston was described as a “laboratory for the future of America.” Now, the city of 14,000 is becoming a test of whether that future can survive the anti-immigration policies of the Trump era.

Refugees are legal immigrants — many of them forcibly displaced due to war, political instability or religious persecution. But last year the Trump administration began moving aggressively to restrict their status and benefits. 

A family gardens in their plot at the Jolly Avenue Garden in Clarkston, Georgia, on April 27, 2026. (RNS photo/Nicole Craine)

On the first day of Trump’s second term, he suspended all refugee resettlements, later allowing only white Afrikaners from South Africa to resettle in the U.S. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” eliminated refugee access to Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food assistance. The administration halted green-card processing for large numbers of refugees and said it would re-vet thousands of already resettled refugees.

Georgia has become one of the top five states for federal immigration arrests, with more than 13,600 confirmed arrests from January 2025 to March 2026, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 

White House border czar Tom Homan earlier this month praised the work of Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and said that “mass deportations are coming.”

That has left many refugees fearful and advocates on high alert. 

Many have joined groups on the high-security private messaging app Signal. They have hosted Know Your Rights meetings and emergency preparedness seminars. They have begun stockpiling nonperishable food and other supplies in case they need to provide them.

“I’ve regularly heard in community meetings here, as folks compare notes about all these enforcement changes, saying, please let your friends know in other parts of Atlanta that if they are engaged in anything like a protest, don’t do it in Clarkston,” said Rusty Pritchard, senior director of program integration at Friends of Refugees. “Don’t draw fire here because the community is so vulnerable.”

The motivation of many of these projects is deeply rooted in faith. Pritchard calls it “philoxenia,” from the Greek, “love of neighbor.” In the New Testament, the word is typically translated “hospitality.”

Earlier this year, a DeKalb County commissioner proposed a resolution condemning the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis and declaring that federal immigration agents were not welcome in DeKalb — home of Clarkson. The resolution was withdrawn, but not because commissioners support the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda. The seven-member board, all Democrats, feared a potential backlash; one commissioner said it would only make “the target bigger.”

Clarkston became a veritable resettlement hub after the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. The city had plenty of housing, schools within walking distance and access to public transportation. Before long, word spread, and refugee families were asking resettlement agencies to be placed in Clarkston. (Many moved away within a few years once they were able to afford a home.)

The reception given to refugees has varied over time. The Rev. Alvin Lingenfelter, pastor of Clarkston United Methodist Church, said that when he looked at church membership rolls from the 1980s and 1990s, he saw that on one side of the ledger were many foreign names, denoting new arrivals; on the other side was a tally of people — many with Anglo names — leaving the church.

While some whites took flight, moving to other parts of the state, Black residents for the most part remained. Occasionally tensions flared. In 2013, Clarkston Mayor Emanuel Ransom, the city’s first Black mayor, ran for reelection on a platform of pausing refugee resettlement in the city, saying newcomers were straining city services.

He lost to Ted Terry, then only 31, who embraced Clarkson’s identity as a city that welcomes refugees.

“Even though there might have been some tensions with that refugee pipeline, you have a lot of more compassionate-minded people here who understand that welcoming refugees is (not only) the right thing to do, but also important from a standpoint of national security and promoting world peace,” said Terry, who served six years as mayor. Since 2020, he has been a DeKalb County commissioner.

Refuge Coffee Co. in Clarkston, Georgia, on April 27, 2026. (RNS photo/Nicole Craine)

Today, international restaurants, supermarkets and hair salons predominate along Clarkston’s strip malls, boasting signs in a host of alphabets. People walk the streets in their traditional clothing in vibrant colors and diverse fabrics. In addition to churches, the city has two Vietnamese Buddhist temples and a bustling mosque.

If the town of Clarkston has a front porch, it’s Refuge Coffee at the corner of Ponce de Leon Avenue and Market Street. This former gas station features a bright red food truck at one end of a long canopy, beside which are a set of outdoor picnic tables. On any given morning, the languages spoken in this outdoor space range from Arabic to Swahili to Pashto. The indoor shop is a meeting place for language classes and other refugee meetups.

Kitti Murray, a 69-year-old entrepreneur with a shock of platinum hair, can usually be found at one of the picnic tables talking to customers. Eleven years ago, she started Refuge Coffee, a nonprofit coffee shop, with her husband, Bill, a retired Southern Baptist pastor who died in 2023. 

The two had moved from a downtown Atlanta apartment to Clarkston on a mission to be closer to those the Bible called “the widow, the orphan and the stranger.” (She now attends an Anglican church.) The coffee shop hires refugees, trains them how to be baristas and offers them a full-time job at $20 an hour, typically for 18 months.

The place is buzzing with activity from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., six days a week. There are no Bibles here or pithy Scripture verses painted on the walls. Murray did not want refugees to feel they were being proselytized to as they picked up their cup of joe.

“Our agenda is to not have an agenda,” said Murray. “It’s to say to people, you’re free to breathe and dream and have coffee and be here and feel welcomed. If we have one word to say about our mission, it’s welcome.”

 

When customers asked for a space for an iftar meal to break the fast during the month of Ramadan back in 2017, Murray gladly obliged, and a community tradition was born. This year, however, the city’s Muslim refugee community felt unsafe gathering, and the event was scrapped. 

Refuge Coffee recently began offering its employees workshops on emergency preparedness. The idea is to draft a document listing everyone in a household, whom to call in case of arrest or detention, who should have custody of children and where important documents are located in the house. Murray is now requiring all her employees to have such a document.

Churches in Clarkston began serving these new immigrants early on. Although the issue of compassionate immigration policies has generally been championed by the religious left, in Clarkston, Christians across the political spectrum have backed it. 

Clarkston United Methodist, a large brick building in town, attracts only 30 people on Sunday mornings, but more than 700 people visit the building each week. A Congolese congregation holds services in the building on Sunday afternoons. An international congregation of Seventh-day Adventists meets there on Fridays and Saturdays. Multiple nonprofit groups gather there. It rents two homes on its property to the nonprofit Friends of Refugees.

“The congregation has recognized that they’re not the most important thing happening at the church — and very willingly,” said Lingenfelter. “We’re a group that believes that our faith is to love God and love our neighbor. We’re trying to figure out how we can continue to serve them.”

When Clarkston Baptist Church faced dwindling membership during the late ’80s and ’90s, it revitalized by merging with an Asian and an African church. The congregation became Clarkston International Bible Church in 2004, while keeping its Southern Baptist affiliation.

Its multiethnic composition — the church has no ethnic majority — drew the attention of the denomination’s humanitarian aid group, Send Relief. In 2018, it proposed buying the church land and building a ministry center on the site. The church sold its building for $1 and now meets in the old gym. A few feet away, Send Relief has built a large ministry center that rents out space to local nonprofits that help refugees. Six other smaller congregations of various ethnicities also meet there.

“Clarkston has long been one of the most diverse communities in North America and a significant place of welcome for refugees and immigrants rebuilding their lives in the United States,” said Josh Benton, Send Relief’s vice president for North American ministry. “That made it a natural place for Send Relief, for the better part of the last decade, to help churches learn how to serve across cultures with compassion, humility and practical care.”

While rank-and-file Southern Baptists, like many evangelicals, generally support Trump’s mass deportation agenda, pastors tend to champion legal immigration. A poll from Lifeway Research suggests that pastors view immigration positively: 98% believe legal immigration is helpful to the United States, and 53% said the U.S. should increase the number of legal immigrants approved in a year.

Trent DeLoach, the pastor of Clarkston International Bible Church, shares those views.

“We want to see refugee resettlement renewed, and honestly, we’d love to see it renewed at the same levels that it was under the Obama and Biden administration,” said DeLoach. “The beauty and the benefit of the vast, vast majority of refugees is that they will work hard and help strengthen our country.”

The Send Relief ministry campus now rents space to a low-cost (in some cases, free) health clinic called Ethnē Health. In partnership with Friends of Refugees, Ethnē recently started a prenatal and postpartum clinic called the Peace Project.

Oriakhil, the Friends of Refugees manager, was a part of the effort to establish the clinic. She long ago realized most obstetrician offices won’t accept pregnant women if they arrive much after their first trimester, and she wanted to help pregnant immigrants find the medical care they need.

“This is what I dream to see one day in every city in the United States,” Oriakhil said. “My passion is to step in and help other women. I lost my first pregnancy. I don’t want that to happen to any other woman in the community.”

Now, she wonders if anyone will come.

A tool shed with welcome signs in multiple languages at the Jolly Avenue Garden in Clarkston, Georgia, on April 27, 2026. (RNS photo/Nicole Craine)