An employee of a nonprofit that helps resettle refugees in Alabama has lost her job after speaking out publicly against her employer’s decision to help resettle Afrikaners in the state.

Yasmeen Othman, a former employment specialist with Inspiritus, said she was fired on May 21 for speaking with AL.com for a story published the week before about the arrival of several families from South Africa in Alabama.

“I feel like it’s disrespectful to the refugees that we are assisting and helping, that are running from violence and forced displacement, to be helping this population,” she told AL.com in mid-May.

A week later Othman, 27, lost her job.

She said her employer told her it was because she violated policy by speaking to the media and because she had continued to try to convince her co-workers to resist the group’s decision to help Afrikaners.

“We do not comment publicly on personnel issues,” said a spokesperson for Inspiritus when asked about the termination.

The Trump administration brought about 50 Afrikaner families to the U.S. They did so after blocking thousands of refugees who had already been given permission to enter from other countries.

Instead of accepting such refugees, as the U.S. had historically done, President Donald Trump decided to allow only Afrikaners, a white minority group descended from European colonizers, to enter the country as refugees.

In mid-May, Trump stated that Afrikaners were victims of genocide in South Africa, a claim the country’s president has denied.

Afrikaners are descendants of Europeans who colonized South Africa and upheld the country’s brutal apartheid regime. They are an ethnic minority, and some claim they are now denied opportunities because of their race.

“I don’t think it’s just to have this group come in with special treatment,” said Othman.“(Refugees are) fleeing violence and displacement. For them to be put on pause and to let these individuals in, with no evidence of them going through genocide, (is wrong),” she said.

Othman said she and her co-workers learned several weeks ago that Inspiritus had decided to resettle Afrikaners in Trump’s new program. She said she immediately voiced her concerns to her higher ups.

“It is unjust for us to no longer be serving actual refugees from around the world, many of whose lives are in danger, but instead only serving people who don’t qualify as refugees, and have been given special treatment,” she said she had told them.

While the Episcopalian Church decided not to help resettle the Afrikaners due to moral objections, and shuttered its decades-old resettlement efforts nationwide, Inspiritus — which is based in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee — opted to work with the administration.

“We are mandated to serve all refugees, no matter how they arrive,” Liz Kurtz, the Alabama refugee coordinator for Inspiritus, said earlier this month.

Othman said her employer told her that they had no choice but to participate in the program in hopes that Trump would allow other refugees to resume entering the U.S. She said she felt ethically obligated to share her criticisms with the media, and so she spoke with AL.com for an article. She then arranged two meetings with her peers at work.

“They offered hollow justifications for not acting themselves,” she said. One person said they were afraid that not helping Afrikaners would cause her to be accused of racism against her fellow white people, she said.

On May 21, Othman was fired. That day, she said a person with a local business stopped by the office and said they would like to hire Afrikaners but not non-English speaking refugees who they did not want to, “babysit,” Othman told AL.com.

She said she felt an ethical responsibility to speak up.

“Unfortunately, people think that, you know, if you fight for the right thing, that means that ‘nothing bad should happen to me. There should be no consequences.’ But unfortunately, that’s not the case,” she said. “I would definitely do it again.”