The Trump administration plans to slash refugee admissions to a record low level in the upcoming year, reserving a bulk of the limited slots for white Afrikaners from South Africa and others facing “unjust discrimination,” according to people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The New York Times.
President Trump is expected to lower the ceiling on refugee admissions to 7,500, a drastic decrease from the cap of 125,000 set by the Biden administration last year, according to a presidential determination dated Sept. 30 and signed by Mr. Trump.
The new limit would effectively shut the door to thousands of families waiting in camps around the world and refocus a program meant to provide sanctuary for those fleeing war and famine to support mostly white South Africans.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced plans for the refugee program, said the limit on admissions would be final only when the administration consulted with Congress, as the federal government is required by law to do each year. The official said the government shutdown was preventing that consultation from happening and claimed no refugees would be admitted into the country in the fiscal year that started on Oct. 1 until Democrats and Republicans reached a deal to fund the government.
Mr. Trump took steps to effectively kill the refugee program when he signed an executive order on the first day of his second term suspending resettlement for most refugees. He has also effectively cut off migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border from seeking protection under another program known as asylum, part of a broader effort to restrict immigration to the United States.
Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, a Jewish resettlement agency, said the administration was eroding America’s global standing by turning its back on the most vulnerable.
“Such a low refugee ceiling would break America’s promise to people who played by the rules,” said Mr. Hetfield, whose organization has had to lay off more than half its staff since Mr. Trump gutted funding for the refugee program.
“Trump isn’t just putting the Afrikaners to the front of the line,” Mr. Hetfield said. “He is kicking years-long-waiting refugees out of the line.”
The new ceiling on refugee admissions would be half the previous record low of 15,000 slots that Mr. Trump set before leaving office in 2020.
In the 2024 fiscal year, the United States resettled roughly 100,000 refugees for the first time in more than a decade. That number has withered since Mr. Trump paused the program. Figures for refugee arrivals in the government database have not been updated since he returned to office, but officials working with refugee organizations say just scores of non-South African refugees have been processed into the United States.
When the administration froze the program in January, the White House argued that the nation did not have the resources to absorb refugees after a record number of migrants entered the United States through the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration.
Migrants at the border, however, enter the nation through a program that is separate from the State Department’s roughly 40-year-old refugee program. Applicants for the refugee program must often wait years in camps overseas before coming to the United States. They must pass extensive background checks, interviews and medical exams before they are welcomed to the country.
The Trump administration has argued that the program needs to be upended to align with the national interests of the United States.
For Mr. Trump, that has appeared to mean refocusing the program on South African descendants of Dutch and French settlers who arrived there in the 17th century.
After he suspended refugee admissions in January, Mr. Trump signed an executive order stating his administration would create an exception for Afrikaners from South Africa, even as Congolese families in refugee camps and those hoping to flee civil war in Sudan remained cut off.
Mr. Trump has claimed that the South African minority faces racial persecution in its home country, a claim vigorously disputed by government officials there. Police statistics do not show that white people are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in South Africa.
The first group of Afrikaner refugees arrived on a chartered flight in May, a remarkably quick turnaround given that families from other nations often wait years for their chance to be vetted and brought to the United States. They were resettled in Alabama, New York and North Carolina, among other states. Dozens more have arrived since then, according to people familiar with their resettlement, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak about the matter.
Meanwhile, thousands of other refugees who were in the process to be welcomed to the United States remain stuck overseas.
About 130,000 conditionally approved refugees and 14,000 Iranian religious minorities who registered to come to the United States remain in limbo. They had already met American standards for acceptance into the U.S. refugee program.
Twin Falls, a city of about 55,000 in southern Idaho, had been receiving hundreds of refugees annually, until Mr. Trump paused the program. The refugee families there had fled countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea and Sudan, and many had waited years for approval to travel to the United States, living precariously in camps or urban centers.
Some of the newly arrived Afrikaners have also encountered challenges in the United States, even after Mr. Trump said in March that they would enter with a “rapid pathway to Citizenship.”
In May, two Afrikaner families were resettled in Twin Falls. They represented nine out of the first group of 59 Afrikaners who arrived under the Trump relocation program.
The resettlement agency in Twin Falls offered the Afrikaner families the same assistance it gave other refugees, including case management, housing placement and cultural orientation for the first four months.
In June, one Afrikaner family, that of Willem Hartzenberg, was living in a duplex next door to a Sudanese refugee family in a development of tract homes.
He declined to speak with a reporter, and urged her to leave without answering questions. But his partner, Carmen, said they were waiting for their Social Security numbers to begin their job search.
Mr. Hartzenberg could not be reached for an update on his family’s circumstances.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
The post Trump Administration Is Said to Plan to Cut Refugee Admissions to a Record Low appeared first on New York Times.
