Benjamin Schoonwinkel took President Trump at his word.
The United States would welcome South Africans like Mr. Schoonwinkel, white Afrikaners who Mr. Trump said had become victims of government discrimination in the decades since apartheid ended and the country’s Black majority gained political power. Afrikaners who claimed past persecution or fear of future harm could come to the United States as refugees, Mr. Trump declared, even as his administration was closing that door to the rest of the world.
In September, Mr. Schoonwinkel boarded a flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta, and on arrival told U.S. border agents that he was seeking asylum.
But he hadn’t come through the refugee program, as the Trump administration had intended. Rather, Mr. Schoonwinkel, 59, had chosen to travel on a tourist visa and to seek asylum.
Instead of being allowed to enter the country, he found himself in handcuffs. Within two days, he was in a federal detention center in rural Georgia, where about 2,000 people who have been swept up in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown are being held. He has been there for almost 100 days.
“I never expected this to happen,” Mr. Schoonwinkel said in a video interview this month from the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. “I expected a little bit of red tape.”
Mr. Schoonwinkel’s case may represent one of the more curious effects of Mr. Trump’s sweeping reshaping of American immigration. An Afrikaner, excited by the president’s public embrace of his community, travels to the United States expecting a warm welcome, but instead confronts the other side of Mr. Trump’s policies: long detentions that have typically entangled migrants from Latin America.
Mr. Schoonwinkel, who speaks English and Afrikaans, now shares a dormitory with dozens of immigrants, mostly Spanish speakers, arrested under Mr. Trump’s mass deportation effort. Like them, he wears the blue uniform of noncriminal detainees, sleeps on a metal bunk bed and earns $2 a day for cleaning duty.
But unlike many of them, who traveled to the United States from poverty-stricken villages in Latin America, he traded a comparatively comfortable life for confinement. And unlike nearly all of the people he is now locked up with, Mr. Schoonwinkel is white — a fact that has led to some bewilderment among his fellow detainees.
“They all ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’” he said.
In February, Mr. Trump designated Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch and other European settlers, as the only group eligible for refuge in the United States after having halted admissions of people elsewhere who are fleeing war and persecution.
By executive order, he directed his administration to “prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement” for Afrikaners who say they have been discriminated against, denied job opportunities and faced violence because of their race, though the specifics of their cases are unclear.
Mr. Trump has asserted that Afrikaners were “victims of unjust racial discrimination” sponsored by the state, a claim disputed by the South African government. Police statistics do not show that white people are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in South Africa. Mr. Trump has also made baseless assertions that Afrikaners are being targeted in “a genocide.”
The first 59 Afrikaner refugees arrived in the United States in late May after applying for the refugee program while in South Africa and being vetted, according the Department of Homeland Security. Dozens more have followed the same process since. Nonprofit agencies that previously helped people fleeing Afghanistan, Sudan and other conflict zones have been tasked with supporting Afrikaners, providing rental assistance, job placement services and other benefits.
“When I saw President Trump brought some Afrikaners to the U.S., I contacted Ben,” recalled Rick Taylor, a friend of Mr. Schoonwinkel’s who had planned to receive him in Arkansas. The two men had worked together for a large U.S. military contractor in Afghanistan.
“I said, ‘I think this is a good time for you to come here,’” he said, adding, “Ben had the money and means to get a good start and make it here.”
Mr. Schoonwinkel, who is single, decided to come on his own rather than through the refugee program, which he said he did not understand to be a requirement. He had gotten advice suggesting that an asylum claim could work in the same way that the refugee program did.
But when he told the officers at the airport that he was seeking asylum, they detained him, apparently following a new federal protocol.
In another era, Mr. Schoonwinkel would not have been taken into custody, but instead allowed to live freely in the United States while pursuing his asylum case. Under Mr. Trump, however, people requesting asylum at ports of entry are to be detained while their cases crawl through the immigration court system.
Mr. Taylor, 63, said he was stunned by his friend’s detention. “We thought he was doing it the right way,” he said.
He found an immigration lawyer to assist Mr. Schoonwinkel.
The lawyer, Marty Rosenbluth, a former anti-apartheid and human rights activist, was reviewing intake files at his office when he learned of his new client from South Africa.
“I assumed he was Black,” Mr. Rosenbluth said in an interview. “Why else would he be in ICE custody?”
“It never crossed my mind he could be Afrikaner,” Mr. Rosenbluth recalled, adding that he knew that group had been singled out for protection by Mr. Trump. “I thought, how could this be happening?”
Mr. Rosenbluth contends that Mr. Schoonwinkel’s due process rights had been violated. His client, he said, should have been released into the country to file an asylum application with Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“He had the right to make his case without being thrown into a hellhole,” Mr. Rosenbluth said.
He fired off emails to ICE, asking why his client had been detained and citing the president’s executive order. He said he received no response.
“The motivation behind the executive order makes it clear he should not have been detained for a minute,” said Mr. Rosenbluth, who said that his client has no other issues that should affect his move to the United States. “He’s probably the only Afrikaner in immigration detention.”
Mr. Schoonwinkel’s immigration case has played out haphazardly in a court system straining under tens of thousands of new proceedings. For a while, his lawyer struggled to get the government to respond or even mount a case against him. Eventually, ICE officials said his tourist visa had been rescinded when he requested asylum.
“Anyone who claims asylum at a port of entry is subject to mandatory detention while the government investigates their claims,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department.
“If their claims are found to be valid, they will be granted relief,” she said in a statement. “If they are found to not be valid, they are swiftly removed.”
She said that Afrikaners continued to arrive in the United States through the refugee program after being “strictly vetted.” Mr. Schoonwinkel, she stressed, had not entered as a refugee.
In his asylum application, reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Schoonwinkel said that he had been persecuted based on his race, political opinion and membership in a particular social group.
He said that he had been attacked in December 2014 on his farm by two Black men, claiming that they beat him, tied him up and held him at knife point. The property was looted, he said.
“I lost all my hope of walking out alive,” he said, adding that the attack had left “deep emotional scars.” He said he sold his land over security concerns.
He said that he had notarized documents supporting his claim in luggage that the U.S. authorities had confiscated, along with his passport.
Mr. Schoonwinkel is expected to learn next month when a hearing will be set for him to present the merits of his case.
“This is the most winnable asylum case I have ever had,” Mr. Rosenbluth said. “All I have to do is present all of Trump’s rhetoric, and everything his administration has been saying, about South Africa.”
For now, Mr. Schoonwinkel waits. During the video interview, he appeared and sounded unwell. “We are all sick and coughing,” he said.
Despite language barriers, Mr. Schoonwinkel said he has made some friends in detention. Recently, he cooked spaghetti with detainees from Colombia and Mexico, he said.
He calls his friend in Arkansas almost daily. Mr. Taylor deposits money into his commissary account for phone credits and items like toothpaste.
“I am worried about Ben,” Mr. Taylor said. “I believe President Trump would release him if he knew about this.”
John Eligon and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
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