President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said the white South Africans who left for the United States after being granted refugee status by President Trump were “cowardly,” as tensions mount between the two countries.
“They are running away” from a duty to help South Africa solve its own problems, Mr. Ramaphosa told reporters on Tuesday, adding, “When you run away, you are a coward.”
More than 8,000 South Africans have expressed interest in a U.S. program created to help a white ethnic minority in South Africa resettle in the United States. That comes even as the Trump administration has barred most refugees from other countries.
If approved, those South Africans would join the dozens who arrived on Monday at an airport outside Washington on a charter flight funded by the United States. On Wednesday Mr. Ramaphosa’s office confirmed that he is scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump in Washington on May 21.
The refugee program has cut to the heart of post-apartheid race dynamics in South Africa. The country’s government has strongly rejected the Trump administration’s claim that Afrikaners — members of a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa — should qualify for refugee status.
The Afrikaners “do not fit the definition of a refugee,” Mr. Ramaphosa said on Monday at a forum in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
He said that a refugee is “someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution,” and forcefully said that does not describe the experience of white people in South Africa.
Mr. Trump has long repeated conspiracy theories about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the three decades after the end of apartheid.
In 2018, he said he told his secretary of state to look into “the large-scale killing of farmers,” and repeated the claim in his second term, saying that white farmers were “being brutally killed.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire who is from South Africa and has become a close adviser to Mr. Trump, shared similar far-right conspiracy claims in 2023 on X: “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa.”
Official figures and the country’s biggest farmers’ group dispute such a claim: South African police data shows that, of the 225 people reported killed on farms from April 2020 to March 2024, only 53 were farmers, who are usually white. About 100 were workers, who are mostly Black.
In February, Mr. Trump signed an executive order suspending all foreign aid to South Africa, claiming that white landowners were mistreated.
At the same time, his administration has made it almost impossible for other people, including those from war-torn or famine-hit countries to seek refuge in the United States. That includes Afghans who helped the United States fight the Taliban and Congolese fleeing conflict who had already been vetted and cleared to travel before Mr. Trump took office.
But the Trump administration approved the application from the Afrikaners in just three months, an extremely fast turnaround for a process that often takes years.
The move to grant Afrikaners refugee status has only aggravated relations between the two nations.
South African officials have cast the move as a politically motivated attempt to discredit the country. The Trump administration has criticized the South African government for having a close relationship with Iran and for its stance against Israel.
Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
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