President Donald Trump on Monday defended welcoming white South Africans as refugees, claiming baselessly that they were victims of “genocide.”
Trump was asked why the U.S. on Sunday paid for a charter plane to fly over dozens of families who say they have been targeted with violence, even as his administration has put a hold on many other refugee admissions.
“Because they’re being killed, and we don’t want to see people be killed,” Trump said. “Now, South Africa leadership is coming to see me—I understand sometime next week— and we’re supposed to have a G20 meeting there or something.”
“I don’t know how we can go unless that situation’s taken care of,” he told reporters. “But it’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about, but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place.”
Trump added of the Afrikaners, the white minority behind apartheid: “Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. But whether they’re white or Black, makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa, and the newspapers and the media, television media, doesn’t even talk about it.”
Trump claimed that if the races were reversed, then “that would be the only story they talk about.”
“I don’t care about their race, their color, I don’t care about their height, their weight. I don’t care about anything. I just know that what’s happening is terrible,” he said. “I have people that live in South Africa. They say it’s a terrible situation taking place, so we’ve essentially extended citizenship to those people and to escape from that violence and come here.”
Forty-nine Afrikaners boarded Sunday’s flight from Johannesburg, The New York Times reported, adding that the U.S. embassy had told them not to talk to reporters.
By March, more than 8,000 Afrikaners had reached out about applying to be admitted as refugees, the State Department said, according to the paper.
Under apartheid, Black citizens were prevented from owning decent farmland. And even though apartheid ended in 1994, white South Africans own about half the country’s farmland despite being 7 percent of the population. They are also generally wealthier and have higher employment rates.
In response, the country’s president signed a law empowering the government to seize private property without paying back its owner. No seizures have yet been made, the Times notes.
Yet earlier this year, when South African-born Elon Musk brought this to Trump’s attention, the president launched “Mission South Africa” to help white citizens relocate to the U.S.
South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rosool, then claimed the Trump administration was trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle that there is a global protective movement that is beginning to envelop embattled white communities or apparently embattles white communities.”
In response, Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned him from the U.S.
The post Trump Defends Importing White South Africans With Bogus Claim appeared first on The Daily Beast.
