The U.S. will welcome 17,500 additional White South Africans who claim to be “refugees” from what the Trump administration has called “government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” over the next year.
This is the latest wave of White refugees from a country where Afrikaners, a White minority who ruled South Africa with an oppressive grip, brutally dispossessed the Black majority during the colonial era and apartheid, siphoning land and resources. South African officials have repeatedly denied the persecution.
Significance. According to a document The Associated Press said it obtained, the administration sent a notice to Congress that they were welcoming White South Africans because they were facing forms of persecution and would be likely to assimilate to the U.S. They informed Congress that they intended to spend $500 million to resettle the White Africans in the U.S., the Associated Press reported.
Overlooked angle. A fact check, previously done by The Emancipator, found that the Trump Administration used racial preferencing to grant White South Africans refugee status, despite claiming that they did not receive exclusive treatment.
In January 2025, Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program that admitted over 64,000 refugees into the U.S., with more than two-thirds coming from Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burma, according to the State Department.
The Trump administration defended their preferential treatment by flooding the media with misleading falsehoods about Black South Africans taking the Afrikaners’ farmland and spreading outright lies about White farmers being “brutally killed” for their land. Trump has also falsely claimed that there is a “genocide” in South Africa that has targeted White South Africans, and justified their preferential treatment.
Power structure. An Emancipator analysis of State Department data released in July showed that for seven months in a row, every one of the 7,605 refugees admitted to the U.S. was a White South African.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration has gotten rid of pathways for refugees from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are actually facing violence and persecution.
What experts say. “Across the globe, refugees who have been displaced for years or decades are waiting for the chance to restart their lives in safety,” Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Program, told The Emancipator in a statement.
“For them, the United States Refugee Admissions Program represents their best hope at permanent resettlement. Instead of restricting refugee admissions to fit a political agenda, we must return to a fair system that addresses the scale of global displacement and acknowledges the immense contributions refugees bring to this country.”
