Trump puts white South Africans on citizenship fast track while rejecting all other refugees: ‘As subtle as an air raid’
Since taking office, Donald Trump’s administration has virtually shut down refugee admissions and blocked funding for resettlement groups, stranding thousands of people who were granted entry to the United States for humanitarian protections only to have those offers rescinded.
But the president has singled out one specific group of people who will be allowed entry into the United States and appear to be on a fast track to citizenship: white South Africans.
A group of 59 white South Africans admitted to the United States as “refugees” have been “essentially extended citizenship,” Trump said on Monday.
They were greeted by State Department officials on Monday after landing at Washington Dulles International Airport on a taxpayer-funded flight following their fast-tracked refugee vetting process under the administration’s radically reshaped admissions program.
The president claims white South Africans are victims of “genocide,” echoing a white supremacist conspiracy theory alleging immigration and forced assimilation threaten the existence of white people — a claim that has fueled racist hate and violence against minority groups as well as parallel conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement” theory.
Trump and his Republican allies have routinely amplified a bogus “great replacement” theory that claims Democratic officials are allowing immigrants into the country to manipulate elections. The idea is behind Trump’s anti-immigration agenda as well his executive orders and legislation in Congress taking aim at voter registration and election administration.
“When it comes to race and immigration issues, the Trump administration is about as subtle as an air raid,” America’s Voice executive director Vanessa Cárdenas said in a statement to The Independent.
“While they single out white Afrikaners for special treatment and resettlement, they falsely slander Black and brown refugees and immigrants as dangerous threats and ‘invaders’ — including those who have been vetted with background checks — despite all of the statistical evidence to the contrary,” she added. “It’s inherently hypocritical and ugly, but unfortunately par for the course for this administration.”
The president has previously compared efforts from the South African government to combat racial inequalities from apartheid to anti-white discrimination, and South African officials have accused the administration of using claims from white Afrikaners to undermine the country’s genocide case against Israel now before the International Court of Justice.
White Afrikaners, descendants of Europeans who arrived in the country centuries ago, claim to have been denied jobs and become targets of violence for their race — claims that exploded with new legislation regulating property expropriation.
Viral misinformation claimed dozens of daily murders of white farmers. But it’s been estimated that roughly 50 farmers total, from all racial groups, were killed annually in a country that recorded more than 19,000 murders between January and September 2024.
Still, Trump announced in February he was cutting off funding to South Africa — most of which goes to efforts to combat HIV/AIDS — because the government was “confiscating land” and “treating certain classes of people very badly.”
Trump’s adviser Elon Musk — born to a wealthy family in Pretoria — called South Africa’s property law “openly racist” and accused a Black nationalist political party of “actively promoting white genocide.”
White farmers own roughly 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country despite white South Africans making up about 7 percent of the population. Fewer than 150 attacks involving farmers occurred during the entirety of 2023, according to the Afrikaaner political group AfriForum.
