DULLES, Virginia (AP) — The Trump administration on Monday welcomed a small group of , saying they face discrimination and violence at home, which the country’s government strongly denies.
The decision to admit the 49 people also has raised questions from refugee advocates about when the Trump administration has suspended efforts to resettle people who are fleeing war and persecution and have gone through years of vetting before coming to the United States.
The group from South Africa, including children holding small American flags, arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a private charter plane and was greeted by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar.
“I want you all to know that you are really welcome here and that we respect what you have had to deal with these last few years,” Landau told the group in a hangar at the airport, many of them holding U.S. flags. “We respect the long tradition of your people and what you have accomplished over the years.”
President Donald Trump told reporters earlier Monday that he’s because of the “genocide that’s taking place.” He said that in post-apartheid South Africa, white farmers are “being killed” and he plans to address the issue with South African leadership next week.
That characterization is strongly denied by the South African government and has been disputed by experts in the country and even an Afrikaner group.
South Africa’s government says the U.S. allegations that are being persecuted are “completely false,” and an inaccurate view of its country. It cited the fact that Afrikaners are among the richest and most successful people in the country and said they are among “the most economically privileged.”
Speaking at a business conference in Ivory Coast, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday that he spoke with Trump by phone recently and told him that his administration had been fed false information by groups who were casting whites as victims because of efforts to right the historical wrongs of colonialism and South Africa’s previous apartheid system of forced racial segregation, which oppressed the Black majority.
“I had a conversation with President Trump on the phone and he asked me, ‘What’s going on down there?’ and I told him that what you are being told by those people who are opposed to transformation back in South Africa is not true,” Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa said he thought Trump “understood that.”
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Santana reported from Washington and Magome in Johannesburg, and Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed to this report.
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