Afrikaners arrive in U.S. with praise for Trump, Musk

DULLES, Virginia—Debbie and Nico Van der Westhuizen stepped outside a private hangar at Dulles International Airport in Virginia for their first smoke break as American residents. Along with a dozen other South Africans joining the huddle around plastic picnic tables, they shouted praise to President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and State Department officials who helped 59 Afrikaners fly to the United States on Monday. When the Van der Westhuizens heard in February that the United States would offer them resettlement, they lost no time selling their remaining livestock and possessions. They said their life in South Africa had become dangerous.

“They just come and stay on your land. You can do nothing. They’re just moving in,” Nico told me, sitting at a plastic picnic table outside the hangar. Until this past year, he and Debbie leased a farm in Gauteng, a wealthy South African province. They described several altercations on their land. “They attacked us, they stabbed me with their knife, hit me over the head with the ropes, and the police do nothing,”

When asked who attacked them, Debbie asked, “Can we say black people here?”

The Trump administration has accused the South African government of failing to protect white Afrikaners from violence and of actively attempting to seize their farmland. South African officials argue that claims of white genocide are a conspiracy theory. While South Africa continues to grapple with how to recover from apartheid, the Trump administration is making a rare refugee admittance exception for white farmers it says are the victims of reverse racism.

Meanwhile, refugee advocates are criticizing the administration for giving Afrikaners an unnecessary fast-track to resettlement under the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). On Monday, Episcopal Migration Ministries announced it would end a decades-long partnership with the federal government and would not help resettle the Afrikaners.

On Feb. 7, Trump signed an executive order to open a resettlement program for minority white refugees from South Africa. Of the country’s roughly 62 million residents, only about 4.5 million are white. Of that number, only 2.7 million are Afrikaners, settlers with Dutch ancestry. The State Department refugee program only applies to Afrikaners.

“They’re being killed. And we don’t want to see people be killed,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “It’s a genocide that’s taking place. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.”

In his February executive order, Trump cut all aid to South Africa, citing land policies and the government’s claim that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. Since then, the U.S.-South Africa relationship has deteriorated. A South African court ruled in February that such claims are “clearly imagined” and “not real.” In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expelled South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool.

Trump’s executive order specifically cites a law passed by the South African government last year that allows officials to claim private property for public use. It was designed to make restitution for policies during apartheid that withheld land ownership from black people. But the Trump administration claims the law unfairly oppresses white farmers. Tech CEO Elon Musk, who was born in Pretoria, has called the act a racist ownership law. He’s also posted publicly that South Africa will not allow him to set up Starlink satellites in the country “because I’m not black.” South African officials denied this.

The South African law does not allow the government to seize land without notice. But it does provide a process for the government to negotiate with white farmers to reallocate land, sometimes without payment. As of a 2017 land audit, white South Africans owned roughly 72% of the country’s farming land while black South Africans owned about 4%. Afrikaners were among the white minority rulers during apartheid.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar greeted the Afrikaners at Dulles in a private hangar. They told reporters after that the majority of the refugees who arrived on Monday were South African farmers. [WORLD counted at least 14 children in the group.] Debbie Van der Westhuiven told me that the government did not treat their poultry farm the same as others. When bird flu decimated several flocks, the South African government reimbursed black farmers, not her.

Typically, qualifying for USRAP resettlement takes an 18-24 month process during which applicants must have already fled their home country, registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and cited fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social status, or political opinion. Unlike asylum seekers, a resettlement designation means individuals are approved to work in the United States before they arrive. The State Department did not require UNHCR designation for Afrikaners. The total approval process took less than a month for some applicants. The Van der Westhuivens had their last embassy interview on Wednesday.

Refugees claimed that they qualify not only because of land ownership policies but also due to an atmosphere of race-based violence. Debbie told me she was frequently pushed out of grocery store lines and store dressing rooms because she is white. Landau said the Trump administration also considered a common South African chant of “kill the Boer” and “kill the Afrikaner” as grounds for protected status.

“These people have been living under a shadow of violence and terror for some time,” he told reporters.

The South African government has said that any farm violence is indicative of a widespread problem and farmers are not targeted due to race. South Africa does not report race in crime statistics, and it has seen an overall decrease in farm attacks. According to police statistics, there were 153 farm murders in 1998 and 1999. Between October and December of 2024, there were 6,953 homicides. Of these, 12 were farm attacks, and one victim was a farmer.

While the Trump administration welcomed Afrikaners on Monday, officials say they will not extend the same opening for other groups. On Jan. 20, Trump suspended USRAP. The government reopened it only for Afrikaners and South African racial minorities.

“That pause was subject from the very beginning to exceptions where it was determined that this would be in the interest of the United States,” Landau told reporters. “Some of the criteria are making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security and that they could be assimilated easily into our country. So, the president on Feb. 7 issued an executive order about the egregious conditions in South Africa, and all of these folks who have just come in today have been carefully vetted pursuant to our refugee standards.”

The White House has said that other refugees, particularly from Afghanistan, may apply for asylum. But on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced she would terminate temporary protected status for applicants from Afghanistan effective in July. She said the situation in the country has stabilized and no longer meets refugee requirements.

“Whether or not the broader refugee programs for other people around the world will be lifted is still an ongoing consideration,” Landau said from the airport hangar.

Advocates for other refugee populations argue the White House is unfairly ignoring more vulnerable populations.

Matthew Soerens, vice president of policy and advocacy for the resettlement agency World Relief, is concerned that the administration has not indicated when it plans to reopen the broader refugee resettlement pipeline.

“Our primary focus right now is encouraging the administration to resume the long standing bipartisan refugee resettlement process, which has been a lifeline for persecuted Christians and other religious minorities, for people persecuted for their political beliefs, for those persecuted on account of their race or ethnicity,” Soerens told WORLD. “We’re in the midst of the greatest refugee crisis in recorded history, and there are many Christians who have long been a part of welcoming refugees who want that full program to be reopened.”

But senior adviser Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday that admitting Afrikaners marks a turning point for USRAP, which could have a narrower application. He criticized past administrations for treating it as a way to solve global poverty.

“Wherever there is global poverty or wherever there’s dysfunctional governments, then the U.S. refugee program, comes in, swoops people up, relocates them to America, and you have multigenerational problems,” Miller said. “You get into the second and third generation, you have endemic poverty, you have crime issues, you have immigration issues. The U.S. Refugee Program in America has been a catastrophic failure. … And so this is an example of the president returning the refugee program to what it was intended to be used as.”

Landau did not answer questions on Monday about whether the Afrikaners can apply for citizenship. 

The State Department confirmed to WORLD that the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria is reviewing further Afrikaner applications and reaching out for refugee interviews and processing. The spokesperson did not answer how many applications are pending.

WORLD’s Addie Offereins contributed to this report.