Brandon Bell/AP
You may remember, in the flurry of Inauguration Day executive orders, that President Donald Trump suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program, which in fiscal year 2024 admitted about 100,000 refugees—the most in decades. The decision was one that Trump had teased for months, and it hearkened back to his first term, when his restrictive policies led to a sharp decline in the number of refugees admitted to the United States.
But Trump’s executive order did leave the door open for future admissions “on a case-by-case basis…so long as they determine that the entry of such aliens as refugees is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”
On Friday, we found out one group that might qualify for this special treatment: South Africa’s white Afrikaners.
In a new executive order, Trump cited a recent South African law that he claimed allows its Black-led government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” as reason to cut off foreign aid to South Africa and “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
Trump and his favorite “special government employee,” the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, have long used their bully pulpit to complain of what they see as the persecution of white South Africans—and have found a sympathetic audience among some of their most extreme followers. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote earlier this week:
On Sunday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States would cut aid to South Africa because the country is “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and committing a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION.” The South African-born Elon Musk responded with his own posts endorsing Trump’s claims.
Trump and Musk did not need to say who was allegedly taking whose land. Their far-right followers, who have fixated on the prospect of “white genocide” in South Africa for years, knew the two billionaires were invoking the specter of a race war in which Black citizens “steal” the land of their compatriots. The people who seem most excited by Trump and Musk’s recent defense of South African white people appear to be far-right X users known for posting about race, IQ, and the JQ, an anti-semitic abbreviation for the “Jewish Question.”
When asked to clarify by the press later on Sunday, Trump claimed much the same and said South Africa was “doing things that are perhaps far worse.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump and Musk’s accounts don’t quite jibe with what people are experiencing in South Africa. The South African government repeatedly has denied that land has been confiscated, arguing that the law targets parcels that are not serving the public interest or not being used. Here’s more from Noah:
The Democratic Alliance, a more centrist and white-led party in South Africa, has opposed the law and has argued it needs to be amended. Nevertheless, the party strongly objected to Trump’s recent move and said in a statement released on Monday that “it is not true that the Act allows land to be seized by the state arbitrarily.” It added that funding cuts could have devastating consequences for vulnerable South Africans, explaining that the country is slated to receive $439 million this year for HIV/AIDs treatment and support. “It would be a tragedy if this funding were terminated because of a misunderstanding of the facts,” the party stressed.…
Trump’s claims about the law are also at odds with experts who represent major business interests in South Africa. In response to an interview request, Wandile Sihlobo, the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, directed me to an article he recently wrote about why there was no need to panic about the law. Fasken, a major international law firm, has taken a similar perspective. South African lawyers at the firm concluded that, while they have some reservations about sections of the law, it is generally “doubtful if the Expropriation Act will generally affect private property rights as envisaged” in the country’s constitution. Even the leader of AfriForum, a far-right group that largely advocates on behalf of white Afrikaners and vehemently opposes the Expropriation Act, has expressed concern with Trump’s decision to target South Africa so broadly.
To be clear, then: Trump and Musk are prioritizing not-really-persecuted Afrikaners—Afrikaners!—over potential refugees from any number of dangerous situation around the world, including the more than 10,000 Afghan allies fleeing the Taliban who were already approved to relocate to the United States.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how many Afrikaners would actually take Trump up on his offer. On Saturday, the chief executive of the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity, which represents about 2 million people, told the Associated Press: “Our members work here, and want to stay here, and they are going to stay here. We are committed to build a future here. We are not going anywhere.”
