From the moment she learned of President Trump’s executive order allowing white South Africans to live in the United States as refugees, Zenia Pretorius knew she wanted to go.
She and her husband no longer felt safe in the country because of their race, she said. Then, last week’s Oval Office meeting between Mr. Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa strengthened her desire to move.
During the meeting, Mr. Trump insisted that Afrikaners — the white minority who once ran the country’s brutal apartheid system — were having their farmland seized and being targeted in mass murders. When Mr. Ramaphosa attempted to correct him, Mr. Trump presented video footage and news articles that he incorrectly said were proof.
“It was heartwarming to see that he is taking this seriously,” said Ms. Pretorius, who alleges she and her husband were forced to leave their farm after being threatened and harassed by Black settlers.
Violent crime is widespread in South Africa, but police statistics show that Afrikaners are no more likely to be victims of a crime than anyone else. Yet Mr. Trump’s program is open only to Afrikaners and other racial minorities in the country — everyone except Black South Africans.
At a time when most refugees around the world are unable to gain entry into the United States, the Trump administration has made a specific exemption for white South Africans. The first 59 Afrikaners arrived in May. Thousands more are now seeking tips on how to convince the U.S. government that they deserve refugee status, too.
The U.S. State Department said on Thursday that it had received nearly 50,000 inquiries from South Africans interested in the program.
Sam Busa created a website called Amerikaners after her own interest in applying for refugee status led her to research that she wanted to share with other Afrikaners. The website offers a variety of resources, including a link to a relevant U.S. government website, a checklist of documents applicants need to prepare and answers to frequently asked questions.
Ms. Busa, 60, said she has applied for the program, but is unsure if her experience being held up at gunpoint had to do with race. The perpetrator “happened to be Black,” she said. “But he didn’t come to me because I was white. I just was robbed.”
Such stories of violent attacks are spreading rapidly on social media.
Gail Nel said she had been carjacked and robbed, and that a family friend had been abducted. Ms. Nel, a secretary at a shoe manufacturing firm, wants her 22-year-old daughter to apply with her, but hasn’t been able to convince her yet.
“She only knows South Africa,” Ms. Nel said. “But I know once she graduates and can’t find a job, she will see this is the only option for us.”
Since the fall of apartheid, South Africa has introduced dozens of laws meant to address stubborn economic disparities that have left Black South Africans at the bottom of the country’s economic ladder. Those laws include a land expropriation bill and measures to ensure Black ownership in major corporations.
Ms. Busa said those laws spell doom for South Africa’s future. “The idea that you can’t own a piece of land and have some chickens without thinking the government is coming to take your property, it doesn’t look good,” she said.
Mr. Ramaphosa says no land has been seized by the government and that wider claims of persecution are untrue. In both South Africa and the United States, many have criticized the Afrikaner refugee program as an insult to families around the world facing famine, displacement and civil war.
Jonathan Jackson and Ro Khanna, two Democratic congressmen in the United States, said in a joint statement last week that Mr. Trump was peddling lies.
“His false narrative of a ‘white genocide’ is profoundly insulting and harmful to those who have faced centuries of discrimination and violence under colonialism and apartheid in South Africa,” they said.
Mr. Trump stopped the flow of incoming refugees when he took office in January, stranding many applicants who had already been approved for relocation from war-torn places like Sudan. He used the executive order to carve out the exception for Afrikaners in February.
Despite Mr. Ramaphosa’s attempts to explain that crime affects all South Africans, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that white farmers are the country’s biggest victims.
While in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump lamented that apartheid received extensive media coverage, but that news of the supposed persecution of Afrikaners had been largely ignored.
“It’s all just ridiculous,” said Mavuso Msimang, a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement. “This is all so obvious and known by everybody: No genocide exists.”
The Afrikaners looking to take Mr. Trump up on his invitation say the backlash against their community is unfair.
“We were given an opportunity and we’re extremely grateful for it,” Thea Van Straten, one of the first 59 Afrikaners to come to the United States, said in an interview. “Somebody heard our cries. My question is, ‘Why not us? Why should we not be rescued?’”
Ms. Van Straten said she has gotten to know refugees from all over the world since arriving in the United States. None of them have criticized her for being Afrikaner, she said.
“Every single one of them have said, ‘We don’t understand why you’re getting hammered because you didn’t make that decision,’” she said. “‘You’re caught in the middle.’”
Ms. Van Straten, who owned a farm guesthouse, said she was the victim of four attacks. She said she had to do three separate interviews with U.S. officials before being accepted as a refugee. The interviewers did not ask for proof of the attacks, she said.
Individuals interested in being resettled “must be able to articulate a past experience of persecution or fear of future persecution,” according to a U.S. government website created for those interested in the program.
A 32-year-old Afrikaner said he had taken to social media to find out “how to be convincing that I qualify to be a refugee.” Facebook users advised him to lean into his experiences as a crime victim, he said. In his message to the U.S. Embassy, he shared a story of being mugged last year.
The attacker took his wallet and phone and told him he could afford a new one because he is white, said the man, who requested anonymity to avoid damaging his application.
Leonard Botha, a livestock farmer, said the biggest challenge he faces on his farm is the theft of animals. Living alone with his wife, he said he feels vulnerable.
“I read news of farm attacks and I always wonder when our day is going to come, because it will,” said Mr. Botha, 55. It seems inevitable, he added, that he will eventually apply for refugee status under Mr. Trump.
“It is a given,” he said. “We have to go.”
John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa.
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