Amid a widespread crackdown on immigration and refugee programs, the Trump administration is slated to bring white South Africans to the U.S. as refugees on Monday, multiple news outlets reported. They will now have a pathway to American citizenship.
The move is the first in a “much larger-scale relocation effort,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday. The Trump administration suspended the refugee resettlement program on his first day in office for his second term and froze funding for resettlement agencies. In Uganda, as one example, these cuts mean that food rations for a million people have been cut off. “What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,” Miller said. “This is race-based persecution.
The refugee program is not intended as a solution for global poverty — and historically, it has been used that way.” The Lever first reported the news that white South Africans could be admitted to the U.S. as refugees. The U.S. will give about 50 white South Africans help with housing, groceries, and other needs, according to a document reviewed by the Associated Press. The Trump administration could admit as many as 1,000 Afrikaners this year. They will be receiving emergency support from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
In February, the Trump administration issued an executive order that the U.S. would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.” The White House also released an executive order saying the U.S. would only admit refugees who “can fully and appropriately assimilate.”
Elon Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, was born in South Africa. He has said in a post on X that a political group is promoting a “white genocide” in the country, a claim that has been widely denied. “Far-right-wing groups in South Africa actively go to America and promulgate this idea of a white genocide because, of course, when you have a high murder rate, white people do get murdered,” Gareth Newham, head of the justice and violence prevention program at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa told NBC News in February. White people are likely targeted because they are relatively wealthy, he said. At the root of the Trump administration’s claims is South Africa’s recent expropriation law that allows the government to seize land under certain circumstances.
Thirty years after the end of Apartheid, about seven percent of South Africans are white — mainly descendants of Dutch settlers — but they own almost three quarters of the land. So far, no land has been seized. The government of South Africa released a statement Friday saying that the idea that Afrikaners are discriminated against is “unfounded.” “It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy; a country which has in fact suffered true persecution under Apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again,” said Chrispin Phiri, spokesperson for the Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation.
It can often take years to get approval to come to the U.S. as a refugee, but the Afrikaners only had to wait a few months. The status of other refugees is in limbo. Last Monday, a judge ordered the Trump administration to admit 12,000 refugees who had previously been blocked from entering the country.
“We are profoundly disturbed that the administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved by [the Department of Homeland Security] months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in,” Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian aid society, said in a statement. “That’s just not right.”
