President Donald Trump is granting white Afrikaners from South Africa refugee status, even as he restricts entry for people fleeing from war-torn regions.
The president has launched “Mission South Africa,” a program aimed at assisting white South Africans in relocating to the U.S. as refugees, according to The New York Times.
Office space in Pretoria has reportedly been converted into refugee processing centers, where teams have received more than 8,200 requests from people seeking resettlement to the U.S.
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Trump has repeatedly pushed the narrative that white South Africans have faced persecution since the fall of apartheid, claiming that Afrikaners—a white ethnic minority group descended from Dutch and French colonial settlers—are “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk—who is not of Afrikaner descent but grew up in South Africa during the final years of apartheid, when the country was run by a white supremacist regime that kept its Black-majority population in poverty and under strict racial segregation—has echoed these claims.
In separate posts on X, he falsely claimed that a “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa and that white farmers were being killed daily. The New York Times said that police statistics show white South Africans are no more vulnerable to violent crime than other groups in the country.
Both Trump and Musk have recently fixated on a newly passed expropriations law that replaces apartheid-era legislation and grants the government authority to seize land under specific conditions, such as when it is unused, without compensation—though only after a process subject to judicial review.
Since the end of apartheid, the South African government has tried to redistribute land to the Black majority, and many see the law as a necessary means of redressing historical injustice. Despite white South Africans making up just 7 percent of the population, they still own approximately three-quarters of its land.
Trump condemned the expropriations law, signing an executive order cutting all funding to the country in response.
“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” he wrote on Truth Social on February 9. “A massive Human Rights VIOLATION is happening.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa pushed back on Trump, urging South Africans not to let “events beyond our shores to divide us or turn us against each other.”
“In particular, we should challenge the completely false narrative that our country is a place in which people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution,” Ramaphosa said.
Trump’s decision to grant refugee status to Afrikaners follows his executive order suspending the refugee admissions program, barring people fleeing their countries, including from Afghanistan, Congo and Syria, from entering the U.S.
In that order, the president said the U.S.’ refugee program should, going forward, “admit only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States.”
A federal judge temporarily blocked the order, but the Trump administration still terminated contracts with organizations that assist people seeking refugee status with their applications.
