The US has granted refugee status to 54 white Afrikaner South Africans, who could arrive as soon as Monday in Washington DC, where they will be welcomed by government officials, according to media reports.
Donald Trump suspended the US refugee settlement programme in January on his first day in office, leaving more than 100,000 people approved for resettlement stranded, having fled war and persecution in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan.
In February, Trump signed an executive order directing his government to grant refugee status to Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French colonisers who he claimed were discriminated against.
On Thursday, US officials were trying to arrange a charter flight to land at Dulles international airport, with commercial flights being assessed as an alternative, NPR reported, citing unnamed sources.
The 54 Afrikaners would be met at the airport by “high level officials from the Departments of State and Homeland Security”, with a press conference being planned, NPR said, citing a source who said such a welcome was unusual.
Some officials told the New York Times that the arrival date was not yet confirmed, with plans in flux.
A US state department spokesperson did not confirm the flight plans, saying: “The US embassy in Pretoria has been conducting interviews and processing … While we are unable to comment on individual cases, the Department of State is prioritising consideration for US refugee resettlement of Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
The speed at which the new refugee programme was set up and refugee status granted was faster than normal, a source told NPR. Before the first Trump administration, it took an average of 18 to 24 months for a refugee to be resettled in the US, according to the American Immigration Council, an NGO supporting immigrants.
NPR listed 12 states that had agreed to take in the Afrikaners, some of whom have family in the US, including California, West Virginia and New York, NPR said.
The Department of Health and Human Services will help the South Africans with “housing … basic home furnishings, essential household items … groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid phones,” according to a memo seen by the New York Times.
South Africa was ruled by white Afrikaner leaders during apartheid, which violently repressed the country’s black majority.
More than three decades after white minority rule ended, South Africa remains hugely unequal. White people typically have 20 times the wealth of black people, according to an article in the Review of Political Economy. The black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, compared with 9.2% for white people.
According to the 2022 census, white people made up 7% of the 63 million population, about half of them Afrikaner, while black South Africans accounted for 81%.
Affirmative action policies since apartheid’s end have helped to create a black elite and middle class. However, most black South Africans remain poor.
The policies, along with high crime rates that affect all South Africans, have also nurtured a feeling among some white South Africans that they are now the victims of targeted racism.
More than half of white South Africans think “black economic empowerment” policies should end, compared with a third of black South Africans, according to a survey by Ipsos and the local news outlet News24.
Trump, along with his South Africa-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have repeated the allegations that white South Africans are being discriminated against.
Trump’s February executive order referred to “hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavoured landowners”.
In 2018, during his first presidency, Trump also magnified the unsupported claim, popular globally with the far right, that white farmers in South Africa are being murdered at disproportionately high rates.
US refugee officials were directed to focus on screening white Afrikaner farmers from among the more than 8,000 asylum claims, the New York Times reported.
“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” South Africa’s government said in February.
