A group of 59 white has been welcomed as “” by the Trump administration.
Their arrival comes amid an outcry over the White House’s current campaign of immigrant arrests and mass deportations.
“Welcome to the land of the free,” US Deputy Secretary of State Christoph Landau said as he greeted the group.
“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 of Afrikaners, many of them holding US flags.
The white South Africans arrived in Washington on board a private charter plane, reportedly paid for by the State Department.
They then left on other flights to various US destinations.
Why is the Trump administration taking in white South Africans?
Afrikaners are a white ethnic minority, largely descended from Dutch, German and French settlers.
Afrikaner leaders ruled South Africa during the brutal regime of racial segregation that often saw the violent repression of Black South Africans.
On Monday, repeated disputed claims, popular with the far right, that white farmers in South Africa are “being killed” and even facing “genocide.”
South Africa has a high violent crime rate. While white South Africans have been subject to violence and murder, the country’s crime statistics don’t show that Afrikaners are disproportionately attacked.
South Africa’s government has strongly rejected the claim.
“White farmers get affected by crime just like any other South Africans who do get affected by crime,” Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said on Monday.
The Trump administration has also falsely accused the South African government of seizing land belonging to white farmers.
The claim refers to a new land expropriation law, similar to those in other countries, that aims to make it easier for the state to expropriate land without compensation if it’s in the public interest. No land has been expropriated under the law without compensation.
Trump, who has already canceled foreign aid to South Africa, has said he plans to bring up the issue when he speaks with the country’s leaders next week.
The decision to publicly welcome white South Africans while deporting large numbers of non-white people living in the US has cast doubt on the earnestness of the move.
Trump signed an executive order in February allowing for Afrikaners to claim refugee status. This came only a month after he suspended refugee admissions from the rest of the world.
Trump has denied he is favoring the South Africans because they are white, claiming, their race “makes no difference to me.”
How has South Africa responded to Trump’s allegations?
South Africa’s government, led by President , has said allegations of persecution against white “Afrikaners” are “completely false,” noting that they are among the richest and “most economically privileged” people in the country.
Ramphosa said white Afrikaners had mainly left because they opposed .
Since 1994, when Nelson Mandela won South Africa’s first democratic elections, the once-ruling white minority has retained most of the wealth it had amassed since colonial times.
White South Africans still own three-quarters of private land in the country and have about 20 times the wealth of the Black majority, according to, The Review of Political Economy, an international academic journal.
“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick,” said Ramaphosa on Monday, “but we’ll continue talking to them.”
The leader said he had spoken with Trump recently and told Trump that he had been given poor information by groups casting whites as victims.
Ramaphosa said at the time that he thought Trump “understood” what he was telling him.
Conservative and far-right groups have long pushed the white victimhood narrative in South Africa.
Trump ally , who was born and raised in South Africa, has aggressively pushed such views.
Trump administration plans to welcome more white South Africans
Under eligibility guidelines published by the US embassy, applicants for US resettlement must either be of Afrikaner ethnicity or belong to a racial minority in South Africa.
Once refugees arrive in the US, a network of agencies helps them resettle in new homes. They also receive 90 days of federal assistance for things like rent.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the move “sends a clear message, in alignment with the administration’s America First foreign policy agenda, that America will take action to protect victims of racial discrimination.”
Bruce added that more Afrikaners would be welcomed to the US in the coming months.
Trump’s white South African refugee program has attracted sharp criticism.
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the most senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called it baffling.
“The decision by this administration to put one group at the front of the line is clearly politically motivated and an effort to rewrite history,” she said in a statement on Monday.
The Episcopal Church’s migration service said it will refuse a federal government directive to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status.
It cited the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation” as its reason for doing so.
Edited by: Alex Berry
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