President Donald Trump announced a proposal to extend citizenship to white South African farmers on Friday, citing what he claims is mistreatment at the hands of their government.
“Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social.
But legal experts say Trump alone has no ability to extend citizenship to favored groups.
“This administration has become fixated on using executive orders to try to replace the function of Congress,” Rosanna Berardi, managing partner of an immigration law firm, said in an interview. “To create any type of visa classification… that falls squarely on the shoulders of Congress.”
Berardi said the announcement is just another example of the Trump administration relying on executive orders that surpass the power of the president.
“He does not have the authority to do this. Executive orders can change policies, they cannot change law,” she said, adding that the plan would very likely face immediate legal challenges.
That view was echoed by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “One important thing to understand is that there is no such thing as a ‘rapid pathway to citizenship,” he wrote on Bluesky. “The quickest one is through marriage to a US citizen, where you only have to have a green card for 3 years (rather than 5) before you can apply. Trump can’t create a new pathway without Congress.”
The South Africa proposal is but one of several Trump has made that appear to run afoul of the law.
Last month, immigration attorneys sounded the alarm over Trump’s plan to sell “Gold Card” pathways to citizenship to ultrawealthy foreign investors, seemingly without congressional backing. Berardi said that, too, was an overstep, claiming that only Congress holds the power to create new visa programs.
“There’s there’s a lot of case law that backs up the facts he doesn’t have the authority to do that,” Berardi told Salon.
On top of that, the proposal also makes it clear that the Trump campaign’s promise to broadly shut down immigration won’t be so clean-cut.
“For example, they want to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. They’re talking about terminating it for Ukrainians, but then at the same time they’re saying, well, now we want South Africans in and now we want high-worth individuals, the ‘gold cards,’ which I think is a really dangerous precedent for any country,” she said.
Berardi added that TPS also appears to be a stretch with regard to white South Africans.
“Typically TPS is reserved for countries where it’s just egregious and obvious that it’s not safe to be there. My understanding of the South African quote-unquote ‘crisis’ is it only applies to a certain population, if you will,” she told Salon.
Farmers who Trump suggests are having their “LAND and FARMS” confiscated by the state, are generally land owners who amassed control over the agricultural sector during apartheid and have found a new ally in the second Trump administration. Many prominent Trump backers like billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, as well as David Sacks, have deep roots in apartheid South Africa.
The president went so far as to sign an executive order condemning the “egregious” actions to counteract racial inequity and defend “ethnic minority Afrikaners” last month. That order directed his administration to start a refugee program for “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
Read more
about immigration policy
