Trump Is Bending the Refugee Program to Fit His White Nationalist Agenda

Standing at the Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. on Monday, Trump administration officials welcomed 59 white South Africans to their new home in the United States. “We respect what you had to deal with these last few years,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told a small crowd. “We’re excited to welcome you here to our country where we think you will bloom.”

On February 7, just 18 days after indefinitely closing United States borders to the world’s refugees, Donald Trump announced one exception. Afrikaners — white South Africans descended predominately from Dutch settlers — can now seek asylum in the U.S., while refugees fleeing war and persecution in places like Congo and Afghanistan will be turned away. Adding insult to injury, The Lever reported last week that the Trump administration plans to use federal funds typically reserved for elderly and at-risk refugee populations to resettle as many as 1,000 Afrikaners this year. The first group of Afrikaners arrived today, many of them waving small U.S. flags.

Trump’s executive order prioritizing South Africans under the refugee program is likely due in part to his close relationship with Elon Musk. The billionaire SpaceX CEO grew up in a wealthy family in apartheid-era South Africa and has publicly claimed that white South Africans are persecuted for their race. Peter Thiel, another one of Trump’s far right billionaire backers, also spent years in apartheid South Africa and has praised that system.

But Trump’s fixation on Afrikaners runs deeper than his political allyships: For years, Trump has indirectly platformed the “white genocide” conspiracies of South Africa’s far right. That rhetoric — recently manifested in concrete policies and actions — lays bare the white nationalism at the heart of Trump’s agenda.

Railing against the South African government’s supposed racial discrimination against its white minority population, Trump’s February 7 executive order also included a freeze on all aid to South Africa. At the center of the executive order’s ire is a land reform law, the Expropriation Act of 2024, signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in January. Despite making up just 8 percent of the population, white South Africans own more than 70 percent of the country’s farmland; conversely, Black South Africans, who comprise 81 percent of the population, own less than 5 percent of agricultural land. The Expropriation Act aims to rectify South Africa’s legacy of apartheid and colonization by offering the government a way to seize private lands when it’s in the public’s interest, and for public purposes. Though Trump has tried to treat South Africa’s law as an anomaly driven by racism, we have this legal option in the United States, too — it’s called eminent domain.

Where South Africa’s Expropriation Act differs is that, in some cases, it allows the government to not compensate landowners whose property is seized. Afrikaner groups pushing back against the law neglect to highlight that the massive discrepancy in South African land ownership is born from centuries of colonization — including a 1913 law that restricted Black South Africans from buying land and limited overall Black land ownership to just 7 percent. Trump’s characterization of the law as racial discrimination purposefully ignores this history, and goes so far as to claim that an attempt at restitution for apartheid amounts to a human rights violation.

Of course, Trump’s purported moral commitment to safeguarding human rights has failed to be displayed in the cases of its closest allies — including permitting and facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza, for one. In a cruel inversion, Trump’s executive order actually attacks the South African government for its 2023 case “accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Part of that case’s symbolic power lay in the fact that South Africa — a country that long served as an international model for oppressive apartheid regimes — had chosen to bring it. The United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled last year it was “plausible” that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza under the UN Genocide Convention and ordered the country to “take all measures within its power” to stop it.

But that ruling did not deter Israel from its genocidal assault, nor did it stymie the U.S.’s flow of military aid. Instead, Trump has turned his focus to a different genocide — one that does not exist.

Fringe panic about a “white genocide” in South Africa gained mainstream prevalence during Trump’s first presidency, when right-wing groups pushed the lie that a string of murders on commercial farms was disproportionately targeting white South Africans. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson helped sensationalize these claims at the time, boosting stories about South African farm attacks alongside inflammatory rhetoric about undocumented immigration in the U.S. and a domestic “fertility crisis.” As many analysts pointed out, Carlson’s favored talking points echoed the “great replacement theory,” the white supremacist myth that white U.S. citizens are being systemically erased by people of color.

For years, AfriForum — an Afrikaner advocacy organization characterized as a white supremacist group by the Southern Policy Law Center — tried to lobby the international community to elicit support for its “white genocide” claims. Its executives found sympathetic ears during Trump’s first administration, meeting with his then-national security adviser John Bolton and Sen. Ted Cruz’s staff in 2018. That August, Trump tweeted that he had instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South African land farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of farmers.”

But the “massive human rights violation” that the president has been so keen to highlight is a baseless conspiracy theory. This February, a South African court dismissed claims of a white genocide as “clearly imagined” and blocked a $2.1 million donation to white supremacist group Boerelegioen. From 2016 to 2017, the year that attacks on white farmers began gathering more attention internationally, 74 people across all races were killed on South African farms — a tiny fraction of the more than 19,000 homicides that occurred in the country overall.

Musk himself claimed in 2023 that South African political leaders “are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa.” And on May 12, Trump told reporters he’d chosen to allow Afrikaners to seek asylum in the U.S. because of the “genocide that’s taking place” in South Africa.

The president’s platforming of this lie has dangerous consequences. Take the 2022 shooting in Buffalo, New York, for instance, in which a gunman murdered 10 mostly Black people at a supermarket and cited the great replacement theory in his manifesto. Trump’s violent anti-immigrant policies stem from the same belief: that nonwhite people pose an existential threat to white populations and the U.S. national identity.

In order to adequately grapple with the stakes of Trump’s disparate treatment of global refugees, we must look beyond Elon Musk and see this moment for what it is: The president is weaponizing the asylum process to further fuel racial division and entrench a white nationalist vision for the United States — in the name of “human rights,” no less.