Trump Plans to Admit Up to 17,500 White South Africans as Refugees Next Year
A State Department notice to Congress says the fiscal 2027 refugee slots will go 'primarily' to Afrikaners, at a projected cost of $500 million, while the program stays shut to most other refugees.
The Trump administration plans to admit up to 17,500 more White South Africans as refugees over the next 12 months, according to a State Department notice sent to Congress on Tuesday and first reported by CBS News.
The notice tells lawmakers the administration will set aside 17,500 refugee slots for fiscal year 2027, which begins in October, and that they will go "primarily" to Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch European settlers. The notice puts the cost of resettling them at about $500 million. "The United States anticipates that Afrikaners from South Africa will fully assimilate into the United States in a manner that preserves taxpayer resources for U.S. citizens and does not anticipate other countries resettling Afrikaners," it says.
The State Department justified the plan in stark terms. "Afrikaners face the seizure of agricultural property without compensation; government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business; and hateful rhetoric fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored minorities," the notice says.
The move keeps in place one of the sharpest changes in the Trump administration's immigration policy. Since returning to office, the administration has effectively shut the U.S. refugee resettlement program to most people fleeing war and persecution around the world, while carving out an exception for Afrikaners and resettling thousands of them over the past year and a half. Before Trump returned, the annual refugee ceiling set by the Biden administration was 125,000. In May the administration moved to admit 10,000 White South Africans at a cost of about $100 million.
President Donald Trump has claimed Afrikaners face a "genocide" in South Africa. In a tense Oval Office meeting last year he confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a video about the killings of farmers. South Africa's government has consistently denied persecuting the minority group, and the claims have been widely disputed. A "60 Minutes" report earlier this year featured Afrikaners who rejected the idea of a genocide and said farm murders are part of a broader crime problem that affects South Africans of every race.
The refugee notice comes a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed new sanctions and visa bans on South African officials the administration accuses of discriminating against Afrikaners, including through race-based policies and the seizure of land without compensation. Relations between Washington and Pretoria have been strained for more than a year over the refugee program, South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and U.S. aid cuts.
The allocation is a proposal to Congress. By law, the administration must consult lawmakers on refugee admissions before the fiscal year begins, but the president sets the final number.
