Months after the Trump administration ground U.S. refugee admissions to a halt, suspending a program that lets in thousands of people fleeing war or political persecution, it is preparing to restart that effort - but only for one group: White South Africans.
Plans are underway to fly approximately 60 Afrikaners to Dulles International Airport on a State Department-chartered plane Monday, with federal and Virginia officials preparing to receive them in a ceremonial news conference, according to documents and emails obtained by The Washington Post, as well as three government officials familiar with the preparations.
The arriving families, who are part of a group that President Donald Trump has said faces racial discrimination, will then be resettled outside Virginia in 10 states, according to those familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share details of the preparations.
“The U.S. government is prioritizing the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees, and [the Office of Refugee Resettlement] is coordinating services to ensure they receive the support they need from the very initial days of their arrival,” Miro Marinovich, who oversees the Refugee Program Bureau at the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in an email to other federal officials Wednesday. “The first flight of Afrikaner refugees is set to arrive on Monday, May 12.”
A State Department spokesperson did not answer questions about the flight but confirmed in a statement that embassy officials have been “conducting interviews and processing” in accordance with a Trump executive order in February. That directive to Cabinet officials looked to promote the resettlement of Afrikaners as refugees following a recently signed South African land redistribution law that in some situations allows for property to be taken away without compensation.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, told reporters outside the White House on Friday that “what’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created. This is persecution based on a protected characteristic, in this case, race.”
Refugees are a distinct class of people who have been forced to flee their home country after they have been persecuted or fear persecution - usually death - because of their race, religion, nationality, politics or membership in a particular social group. Highly vetted, they are eligible for government services and a path to citizenship and must often wait up to several years to be screened and processed before coming to the United States.
Last year, no South Africans of any race, ethnicity or linguistic group were vetted by the United Nations as meeting its criteria to be resettled as refugees, according to the organization’s data.
State Department officials would not say why the 60 Afrikaners set to arrive Monday were granted refugee status, but a department memo obtained by The Post said that most of them “have witnessed or experienced extreme violence with a racial nexus,” including home invasions, murders or carjackings that took place up to 25 years ago.
“This initial cohort of refugees has frequently expressed fear of remaining in South Africa due to race-based violence [or] other severe harm,” the memo said, and do not trust police, who they claim have failed to investigate “crimes against Afrikaners.”
But Chrispin Phiri, a spokesman for South Africa’s Foreign Ministry, said in a statement that any allegations of discrimination were “unfounded” and do not meet the threshold of persecution under domestic and international refugee law.
“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” Phiri’s statement said. “A country which has in fact suffered true persecution under Apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again, including through the entrenchment of rights in our Constitution, which is enforced vigorously through our judicial system.”
The Afrikaners’ planned arrival stems from Trump’s efforts to weigh in on the complex racial politics of South Africa, where billionaire Elon Musk, his onetime adviser overseeing massive federal spending cuts, grew up during apartheid.
Since apartheid ended in the early 1990s, South Africa has been wrestling with how to deal with the long shadow of the segregationist policy, which sowed deep racial divisions in the country over four decades.
One of those efforts, a land redistribution law signed in January known as the Expropriation Act, prompted Trump in February to cut all foreign aid to South Africa. He claimed without evidence that the law - which, so far, has not resulted in any land seizures - was an act of discrimination against White landowners.
In his executive order, Trump also directed Cabinet officials to “prioritize humanitarian relief” for Afrikaners who are “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
But as the administration now seeks to offer Afrikaners safe haven in the United States - including through an accelerated process that skips over some typical steps in long-standing vetting procedures for resettlement - its efforts will rely on a system the president has effectively gutted.
All other refugees besides the Afrikaners - descendants of primarily Dutch settlers in South Africa - have essentially been kept from arriving since Trump’s first week in office. Government funding has been slashed to a network of nonprofit groups that help the newcomers acclimate, forcing them to lay off or furlough hundreds of case managers who assist arrivals in finding jobs, housing and other government aid.
After some of those organizations filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the program’s suspension, a federal judge in Seattle on Monday ordered the Trump administration to process and resettle approximately 12,000 people who had been approved to arrive, with their flights booked, before the halt in resettlement occurred. But it is unclear when that may happen.
Bill Frelick, the refugee and migrant rights director at Human Rights Watch, said thousands of refugees, including many Black sub-Saharan Africans, were prepared and ready to be resettled in the United States.
“The door was slammed in their faces,” he said. “Now, to have a group that didn’t flee their country, that has historically enjoyed tremendous privilege in the country and that are White, provides a cruel racial twist to the suspension of refugee resettlement.”
Admitting Afrikaners as refugees was framed by Trump as a response to actions by South Africa that are “undermining United States foreign policy” - a reference to its decision to accuse Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice. He also cited the country’s land redistribution law.
South African officials said the Expropriation Act is a means to end a broad racial disparity in land ownership stemming from apartheid. The country’s first comprehensive land audit in 2017 found that the White population, which makes up about 7 percent of South Africans, accounted for about three-quarters of individually owned farms and agricultural holdings.
The law allows the government to seize land in the public interest, but only after a process that is subject to review by a judge. The lobbying group AfriForum, which advocates on behalf of Afrikaners, has called the law “controversial” and vowed to challenge it.
Trump in his executive order called the measure a “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights” that amounted to “racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
It was grounds enough to roll out the welcome mat and bring Afrikaners into the United States via the refugee program that, last year, resettled 100,000 people from such war-torn countries as Afghanistan, Ukraine and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Yet, with much of that system now dismantled after its funding was slashed, officials with the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services have taken unusual steps to bring the South Africans to the United States.
For example, the Afrikaners set to arrive Monday are not going through a cultural orientation program required of all other refugees before their arrival, the three people familiar with the matter said.
The Afrikaners are receiving what is known as “P-1” refugee status, one of the people said, which typically begins for large groups with a referral and initial screening by officials of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That process is one of several steps meant to ensure that an individual meets the internationally recognized criteria to be deemed a refugee.
UNHCR has not been involved in screening the Afrikaners and was not approached to participate, said Eujin Byun, a spokeswoman for the agency.
Groups that are granted refugee status based on claims of identity-based persecution generally receive “P-2” refugee status, which requires congressional designation. Other categories of refugees require that their spouses, children or parents be already present in the U.S. or that they have private sponsors to receive them.
The U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, has been conducting interviews and processing the families, according to two of the people who discussed the operation. A State Department spokesperson confirmed that to be the case.
Refugee processing is typically done in a third country - separate from the applicants’ homeland and the United States - because refugees by definition are not considered safe in their country of origin.
The federal government typically works with the International Organization for Migration, another U.N. agency, to process refugees overseas and assist them with booking flights to the United States. The IOM is not involved in coordinating the Afrikaners’ travel, the three people familiar with the matter said. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
State Department officials have instead sought to charter planes directly for the families scheduled to arrive from South Africa, documents show. Such a move typically occurs only during emergencies when a large number of people are all being resettled at once, such as during the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
The Afrikaner families set to arrive at Dulles are mostly from rural parts of South Africa, have farming experience and all speak English, according to a State Department memo. About one-third have family members or friends already in the U.S.
After the news conference, they will board connecting flights to reach their final destinations elsewhere. They will be received by local resettlement organizations, according to a handout from the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria for refugees arriving in the U.S. this month. They may also be received by a family member or friend who can support them, though most do not have such ties, the three people familiar with the plans said.
The Trump administration froze State Department funds to those organizations meant to help acclimate refugees to their new homes once they are in the United States, notably by providing medical care, job training and up to three months of rent.
Officials at the State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a branch of HHS, have instead turned to two still-existing pools of money to support the Afrikaners upon their arrival: one meant to cover gaps in funding for particularly vulnerable refugees, and another to help state governments administer job training and other programs for refugees, the three people familiar with the matter said.
The email from Marinovich, the senior HHS official, said that organizations receiving money from the Preferred Communities program, the first pool of money, will welcome the Afrikaners and “assist them with intake and referral to or provision of services such as housing, case management, access to benefits, etc.”
State governments do not usually use their funds to support refugees who are simply passing through on their way to other destinations, the three people said.
However, while no refugees are set to be resettled in Virginia, the state will be spending some of the money that is normally intended for job training programs to welcome the Afrikaner families ahead of Monday’s news conference, the three people said.
Two of the people said that will include providing items for the families’ children while working with a local resettlement group. The Virginia Department of Social Services did not respond to a request for comment.
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Katharine Houreld in Nairobi contributed to this report.