After years railing against immigrants coming to America, Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to prioritize the U.S. resettlement of white South African “refugees” suffering from what he called “government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
Trump also shut down all federal funding for the country, much of which is used to battle AIDS.
Afrikaners, who largely benefitted as white people from the historically racial discriminatory system of apartheid in South Africa, would be resettled in America through the U.S. refugee program.
Trump had suspended the resettlement program by executive order on his first day in office.
Trump accused the South African government in his order of discriminating against the white Afrikaaners, descendants of the largely Dutch colonists who arrived in the country in the 1600s.
Applying old British colonial laws and adding more institutionalized racist legislation, the Afrikaner-led all-white government imposed apartheid on the country in 1948.
The system of “separate development” ensured white people, the majority of them Afrikaans, dominated the economy, including agriculture, until the 1990s.
Trump raged in his order that South Africa’s government is seizing “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and enacting “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity” in employment, education and business.”
He wrote that the U.S. cannot support the government of South Africa’s “commission of rights violations in its country.”
South Africa's government has denied private land confiscations or racially motivated discrimination. Officials have said the government is looking at unused or publicly owned land to give citizens help who suffered generations of apartheid.
The Washington Post has reported that private land is confiscated only “rarely,” and is intended to address the disparities created by apartheid.
Whites, who make up only 8 percent of the population, own 72 per cent of the country’s farmland, while Blacks, who comprise 80 percent of the population, own just 4 percent of agricultural land, according to the country’s 2017 land audit.
In a post on X Monday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to Trump’s earlier attacks on the country, saying the land measure is “not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process.”
Later he vowed in his state of the nation address: “We will not be bullied”
Trump instructed Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in his order to "prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination."
Trump’s right-wing “best buddy” Elon Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa, and overstayed his student visa after moving to the United States for school, his own bother Kimbal has recounted. Musk has long criticized his homeland for being “anti-white.”
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The new order was a flip flop from one Trump signed his first day in office, in which he argued that refugees are a strain on the nations receiving them. Trump said he would only restart the refugee program if he concluded that doing so would serve the interests of the US.
Trump's earlier order did, however, allow officials to make case-by-case exemptions.
The United States provided nearly $440 million in aid to South Africa in 2023, with the majority of funds allocated to HIV/AIDS treatment through PEPFAR, a program that supports 17 percent of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS response and provides lifesaving medication to millions.
