According to two officials, who spoke with Reuters anonymously, "30,000 of the 40,000 spaces would be devoted to Afrikaners, a largely Dutch-descended minority in South Africa that Trump has prioritized for resettlement."
At the end of 2024, the United Nations Refugee Agency reported that there were nearly 43 million people worldwide recognized as refugees, who are forced to flee their home countries due to violence, persecution, or human rights violations.
Among them are:
- Nearly 6 million Syrians forced to flee deprivation, violence, and persecution amid the country's decade of brutal civil war;
- 6 million Afghans facing persecution after the Taliban returned to power in 2021;
- Over 4 million Sudanese and South Sudanese people displaced by war and famine;
- 1.3 million refugees from Myanmar, including the Rohingya, who are fleeing what is recognized by the US as a genocide; and
- The million and growing Haitians fleeing the gang warfare that has overtaken their impoverished nation.
At the beginning of his second term, Trump emphatically slammed the door on all of these groups, indefinitely suspending the US Refugee Admissions Program and halting the process for about 600,000 refugees who were being considered for admission and thousands who'd been approved.
He also shut down CBP One, the application allowing asylum-seekers fleeing violence and poverty to apply for entry at the Southern border legally, and revoked the legal status of millions of people in the country under humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), many of whom now face deportation.
While turning away countless millions facing death and danger, Trump has welcomed Afrikaners, the minority group that implemented and enforced a racist and anti-democratic system of apartheid that deprived Black people of their rights in South Africa until 1994.
Trump is a proponent of the false theory that, since the end of apartheid, South Africa's democratically elected Black government has systematically oppressed and allowed for the murder of white farmers, referring to it as a "genocide."
That theory has been bolstered by Trump's billionaire ally Elon Musk, who is also a white South African. Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence chatbot on his social media platform X, known as "Grok," began to inexplicably discuss so-called "white genocide" in South Africa in response to unrelated prompts, which led many to speculate that Musk had programmed it to amplify the conspiracy theory.
However, as Joe Walsh, a white journalist from South Africa, noted in an article for Current Affairs last year, South Africa's Black population is killed at 10 times the rate of its white population.
In large part due to the legacy of apartheid, white South Africans also have 20 times the wealth of Black ones and hold the vast majority of land in the country despite being just over 7% of the population.
Meanwhile, white South African organizations like AfriForum have argued that efforts by the current government to more equitably distribute land constitute a form of racial discrimination and even genocide against whites.
"The myth's purpose," Walsh wrote, "is to make it seem dangerous to have Black people in control of the government."
But it's a myth with purchase in the White House. While virtually every other refugee group was left in limbo, Trump wrote on Truth Social in April that "Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!"
In May, 59 Afrikaners arrived at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, where the Trump administration celebrated their arrival.
Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch's Refugee and Migrant Rights program, told PBS News, "There were refugees who had been identified, vetted, who had spent years as refugees, and their hopes for admission to the United States after years of suffering had been crushed."
"That now the one exception would be made for Afrikaners," he said, "just seems like a cruel twist to those refugees to whom the door was closed in their face."
Last month, Reuters reported that a senior official from the State Department told the government of South Africa that it was not allowed to process refugees of mixed-race descent who spoke the Afrikaans language for entry into the US. The official said that the resettlement program was only "intended for white people."
In The Hill, opinion contributor Lok Darjee—himself a Bhutanese refugee who fled war in 2011—has described the Trump administration's embrace of white South Africans over other refugees as emblematic of its "racist ideology."
"By admitting white South Africans as refugees and victims of racial persecution," Darjee said, "the Trump administration has sent a dangerous message that in a multiracial democracy, the loss of white dominance is equivalent to persecution."
"In this narrative, South Africa becomes a warning of what awaits the United States should Black and nonwhite Americans gain political power," he continued. "As America becomes a more diverse nation, those who equate whiteness with greatness see this shift not as progress, but as a threat."
