FIRST ON FOX: The USA is about to welcome 49 white South African refugees who’re victims of “government-sponsored racial discrimination” of their homeland, based on the State Division.
The U.S.-chartered flight touched down at Dulles Airport in Virginia on Monday afternoon, when Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau welcomed the group of Afrikaners.
“Confronted with simple government-sponsored racial discrimination in South Africa, the primary Afrikaner refugees have arrived in america,” a senior State Division official mentioned in an unique assertion to Fox Information Digital.
“The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was meant for conditions like this. Underneath President Trump’s sturdy management, the State Division has helped to supply a brand new life for these refugees in America, the place they are going to dwell in freedom, security, and alternative.”
Katia Beeden, life coach and campaigner for White South Africans who need to apply for U.S. refugee standing, poses for an image at her residence in Fish Hoek, Cape City, South Africa, on April 8, 2025. (REUTERS/Shafiek Tassiem/File Photograph)
President Donald Trump first initiated their resettlement with an government order entitled, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” directing the State Division to bump up Afrikaners to the entrance of the road for resettlement.
South Africans are actually capable of submit a press release of curiosity with the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, which can assessment the paperwork and call those that are eligible for the interview course of.
Trump has nearly halted the refugee program for these from war- and famine-ravaged nations like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. White South Africans say they’ve been denied jobs and focused for violence on account of their race.
Trump’s government order got here in response to a regulation handed by the South African authorities permitting it to take personal land for public use, typically with out compensation. Trump claimed the regulation can be used to focus on South Africa’s White minority Afrikaner group, descended from Dutch and different European settlers who arrived greater than 300 years in the past.
TRUMP, SOUTH AFRICA IN GROWING ROW OVER HOTLY CONTESTED LAND LAW, COUNTRY’S DEALS WITH US FOES
White South Africans supporting President Donald Trump and South African and U.S. tech billionaire Elon Musk collect in entrance of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria on Feb. 15, 2025 for an illustration. (MARCO LONGARI/AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
The South African overseas ministry mentioned claims that White South Africans confronted a “well-founded worry of persecution” had been “unfounded.”
“It’s most regrettable that it seems that the resettlement of South Africans to america beneath the guise of being ‘refugees’ is fully politically motivated and designed to query South Africa’s constitutional democracy; a rustic which has in truth suffered true persecution beneath Apartheid rule and has labored tirelessly to stop such ranges of discrimination from ever occurring once more,” spokesperson Chrispin Phiri on the Ministry of Worldwide Relations and Cooperation added.
The Afrikaners’ arrival comes as Trump tries to push again on the racial politics of South Africa, the place adviser Elon Musk grew up throughout apartheid.
President Donald Trump and South Africa had been locked in a diplomatic row over a land expropriation act that Washington, D.C., says will result in the takeover of White-owned farms. (MARCO LONGARI/AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
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The Afrikaner households touring to the U.S. are largely from farming communities.
Since apartheid ended within the Nineteen Nineties, South Africa has sought to atone for segregationist insurance policies, together with with the land redistribution regulation signed in January. The coverage got here after a 2017 audit discovered that White South Africans owned three-quarters of individually-owned farms and agricultural property, whereas making up 7% of the inhabitants. Black South Africans had been denied the appropriate to personal prime agricultural land in the course of the apartheid period.
