Fifty-one Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country will spend their first few days in a special welcome centre in Belfast.
They will then be relocated into the private rented sector somewhere in the north-west of Northern Ireland.
The precise location of the centre is being kept secret to protect the families. They include 11 children under the age of five.
They are among 20,000 Syrian refugees being resettled in the UK under its Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme.
Denise Wright, co-ordinator for the Refugee and Asylum Forum, said the families would be taken to the welcome centre where they would be fed and recuperate after their journey from Lebanon.
Wright said the forum had been overwhelmed by offers of help from local people for the Syrian families.
She said: “Obviously these are only 10 families that are coming. There are only so many buggies and so many bags of clothes we can take so we had suggested that people might send us welcome cards.
“We’ve been completely inundated, hundreds and hundreds of them, just to show that real sort of Belfast, Northern Ireland, welcome.”
Northern Ireland’s Department for Social Development has direct responsibility for overseeing the operation of bringing the refugees to Northern Ireland.
Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey, the chairman of the Department of Social Development’s parliamentary committee at the Stormont assembly, said the refugees will initially need peace and privacy on arrival.
He said: “First of all there is the privacy, there is also the actual need to be able to process in peace and quiet. There will obviously be wellwishers who will also probably want to be there as well, but that is not what we want at this stage of the game.
“The security issue is one which would be in the back of people’s minds but it wouldn’t be a predominant fear, I don’t think.”
Two weeks ago the far-right in Northern Ireland attempted to exploit the arrival of the refugees with a march against asylum seekers through central Belfast. However the protest by the Protestant Coalition at Belfast City Hall only drew 25 demonstrators and was vastly outnumbered by an alliance of anti-racist activists.
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