No fewer than 59 white South Africans, on Monday, arrived in the United States after being granted refugee status by the Donald Trump-led administration, which considered them victims of racial discrimination in South Africa.
Defending the move to give priority to white South Africans above victims of famine and war in other African countries, amid criticism from Democrats and stirring confusion in South Africa, Trump claimed the Afrikaners were being killed. However, he did not provide evidence.
Recall that President Trump, in an executive order signed on his first day in office, paused the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, but in February, he offered to resettle Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch settlers, citing discrimination.
“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.
According to him, favouring the Afrikaners was not because they are white, adding that their race “makes no difference to me.”
Meanwhile, following the signing of a bill by South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, early this year, that stipulates the government may, in certain circumstances, offer “nil compensation” for property it decides to expropriate in the public interest, Trump reacted by accusing the African country of targeting the white people in South Africa.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in February, “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
However, the South African government argues that the bill does not allow the government to expropriate property arbitrarily and must first seek to reach an agreement with the owner and also maintains there is no evidence of persecution by Trump and that “white genocide” claims in the country by Trump’s white South African-born ally, Elon Musk, lack evidence.
Reacting to the arrival of the white South African refugees, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who’s 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, as reported by Reuters.
Welcome the first 59 Afrikaners to arrive in a hangar at Washington’s Dulles airport, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, 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.
According to Landau, many of the South Africans were farming families who had worked land for generations but now faced the threat of that land being expropriated, as well as threats of violence.
Charl Kleinhaus, a 46-year-old man, who arrived on Monday with his daughter, son and grandson, and was set to be resettled in Buffalo, New York, claimed his life was threatened and people tried to claim his property as their own.
“We never expected this land expropriation thing to go so far,” he told Reuters.
Sources told Reuters that some of the Afrikaners are heading to Minnesota, a Democratic state with a reputation for welcoming refugees, while others are going to Republican-led states such as Idaho and Alabama.
The State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce also confirmed in a statement that the U.S. would welcome more Afrikaner refugees in the coming months.
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