A white Afrikaner from South Africa who came to the United States expecting preferential refugee treatment from the Trump administration found himself blindsided when he ended up in handcuffs.
President Donald Trump promised that white Afrikaners would receive preferential refugee status because he claimed they were victims of government discrimination after apartheid ended.
Benjamin Schoonwinkel believed him, and in September, he flew to Atlanta and told federal border agents he was seeking asylum, The New York Times reported Friday. But he didn’t come through the refugee program, as the administration wanted. Instead, he came to the country on a tourist visa.
And the decision landed him in handcuffs, and later to a federal detention center in Georgia with about 2,000 other migrants rounded up in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“I never expected this to happen,” Schoonwinkel said in a video interview from the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin. “I expected a little bit of red tape.”
He remains there nearly 100 days later.
The Times wrote that Schoonwinkel’s case spotlights a curious contradiction in Trump’s immigration overhaul: The same administration that publicly championed Afrikaners as deserving humanitarian protection is detaining them under the same brutal protocols applied to migrants from other countries.
Schoonwinkel now bunks with Spanish-speaking detainees and earns $2 a day for custodial work.
“They all ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’” he said.
Immigration lawyer Marty Rosenbluth told the Times he was floored upon learning of the case.
“I assumed he was Black,” Rosenbluth said. “Why else would he be in ICE custody?”
He added: “It never crossed my mind he could be Afrikaner,” noting Trump specified the group was to be protected. “I thought, how could this be happening?”
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