August 16, 2025
trump

The Trump administration welcomed on Monday 59 white South Africans it granted refugee status in the U.S., having deemed them victims of racial discrimination, while drawing criticism from Democrats and stirring confusion in South Africa.

U.S. President Donald Trump has blocked mostly non-white refugee admissions from the rest of the world but in February offered to resettle Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch settlers, saying they faced discrimination.

Asked on Monday why white South Africans were being prioritized above the victims of famine and war elsewhere in Africa, Trump said, without providing evidence, that Afrikaners were being killed.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump told reporters at the White House, going further than he has previously in echoing right-wing tropes about their alleged persecution.

He was not favoring Afrikaners because they are white, Trump said, adding that their race “makes no difference to me.”

South Africa maintains there is no evidence of persecution and that claims of a “white genocide” in the country, echoed

, opens new tab by Trump’s white South African-born ally Elon Musk, have not been backed up by evidence.

The Episcopal Church announced on Monday that it would no longer work with the federal government on refugees after it was asked to help settle the Afrikaners.

“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe wrote in a letter to the church’s followers.

U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the most senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the move “baffling.”

“The decision by this administration to put one group at the front of the line is clearly politically motivated and an effort to rewrite history,” she said in a statement on Monday.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted the first 59 Afrikaners to arrive in a hangar at Washington’s Dulles airport. He compared their journey to that of his own father, a Jew from Austria who fled Europe in the 1930s, first to South America and then to the United States.

93 thoughts on “59 White South Africans arrive resulting from racial discrimination”

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