According to multiple news media reports, the Trump administration will bring white South Africans to the United States as refugees on Monday amid widespread crackdown on immigration and refugee programs. They will now have a path to U.S. citizenship.
White House Vice President Stephen Miller told reporters Friday the move was the first in a “massive relocation effort.” The Trump administration suspended refugee resettlement programs on the first day of its term and freezes funds for resettlement agencies. In Uganda, for example, these cuts mean that food rations have been cut off from one million people.
“What’s happening in South Africa is in line with the textbook definition of why refugee programs are created,” Miller said. “It’s persecution based on race. Refugee programs are not as a solution to global poverty – historically, it has been used this way.”
Leverage first reported on the news that white South Africans could be accepted as refugees.
Documents reviewed by the Associated Press show that the United States will provide assistance to about 50 South Africans in housing, groceries and other needs. The Trump administration can recognize as many as 1,000 Afrikaans this year. They will receive emergency support from the Federal Refugee Resettlement Office, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
In February, the Trump administration issued an executive order saying the United States would “promote the resettlement of South Dutch refugees who evade government-sponsored racial discrimination.” The White House also issued an executive order saying the United States will only recognize refugees that “can be fully and properly absorbed.”
Elon Musk, the so-called head of the government efficiency ministry, was born in South Africa. He said in an article on X that a political group is promoting the country's "white genocide", a claim that it has been widely denied.
“The far-right groups in South Africa are actively going to the United States and enacted this idea of white genocide because of course, when you have high murder rates, white people are indeed murdered,” Gareth Newham, head of the judicial and violence prevention program at the South African Institute of Security, told NBC News February in South Africa’s judicial and violence prevention program. He said white people are likely because they are relatively wealthy.
The root cause of the Trump administration’s claim is South Africa’s recent expropriation law, which has allowed the government to occupy land in some cases. Thirty years after the end of apartheid, about 7% of South Africans were white, mostly descendants of Dutch settlers - but they own nearly three-quarters of the land. So far, the land has not been seized.
The South African government issued a statement on Friday saying the idea that Afrikaans were discriminated against was "unfounded".
"The most regrettable thing is that the relocation of South Africans to the United States under the guise of "refugees" is completely politically motivated, aiming to question South Africa's constitutional democracy; in fact, the country has suffered real persecution under the rule of apartheid and has no power to work to prevent discrimination." Cooperation.
Coming to the United States as refugees often takes years to get approval, but the Dutch have to wait only for a few months. The status of other refugees is in dire straits. Last Monday, the judge ordered the Trump administration to acknowledge 12,000 refugees who had previously been blocked from entering the country.
"We are very upset that the thousands of other refugees approved by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a few months ago were criticized, and we are very upset that we have been criticized," said Jewish Human Assistance Association of Jewish Rescue Association. "That's not right."