The United States once prided itself on being the final destination of people around the world seeking refuge from war and strife. The State Department reports that America has welcomed a total of more than 3.1 million refugees to its shores since the U.S. refugee program was established in 1980. But President Donald Trump has decimated the number of applicants who were granted refugee status — and those who made it through are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of an insidious shift in policy to favor white South Africans.
Of the 4,999 refugees admitted, 4,496 were from South Africa; the remaining three newcomers were from Afghanistan.
Last November, the Trump administration announced it would be putting the lowest cap on the number of refugees that would be admitted in the refugee program’s decadeslong history. Only 7,500 applicants will be provided refugee status in fiscal 2026. That’s a 94% drop from the 125,000 cap the Biden administration had in place for each of the two fiscal years before Trump’s second term began.
The latest numbers from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration only add insult to injury. As of March 31, there have been 4,499 refugees admitted to the U.S., more than half the annual cap. Of those, 4,496 were from South Africa; the remaining three newcomers were from Afghanistan.
“The largest share of South African refugees — over 500 — have arrived in Texas, followed by Florida and California,” The Christian Science Monitor reported last week. The bureau’s data doesn’t include race or ethnicity. But the memo in the Federal Register establishing the 7,500-person cap also required that those slots “primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa … and other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.” It’s no great leap then to presume the South African arrivals this year are all white.
While Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants has hogged the spotlight since January 2025, the administration’s campaign against legal immigration has been no less pernicious. The White House’s chief anti-immigration hard-liner, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has been busy both removing protections for those who have already made it to the U.S. and discouraging those who are hoping to gain entry.
The Guardian reported last fall that Miller, who is also the White House homeland security adviser, has made significant inroads into influencing operations at Foggy Bottom. A top anti-immigration ally, Christopher Landau, is second-in-command at the State Department. Much like his past calls haranguing Department of Homeland Security staffers about deportations and arrests, Miller has also reportedly instated daily calls “to drill the diplomats on visa and immigration issues.”
White South Africans have been one major loophole to Miller’s immigration gatekeeping. Trump has been yelling about the supposed plight of the country’s minority for years now, buying fully into far-right claims that a “genocide” is being carried out against Afrikaner farmers. The truth is that white farmers control about 75% of the country’s farmland and still make up the vast majority of senior positions in South African corporations. As the Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu wrote for MS NOW last year, “If white South Africans are experiencing genocide, then it is truly an enviable genocide.”
Concerned for white South Africans’ imagined hardship, in the face of a new law that replaced an apartheid-era rule, Trump issued an executive order in February 2025 cutting off foreign aid to South Africa. He also directed his government to “prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” Three months later, even while busy stripping parolees awaiting asylum claims of their legal status, the first several dozen white South Africans landed in the U.S.
The cruelty of this racist policy is only exacerbated when you consider the compounded effect of the other actions Trump has taken.
The cruelty of this racist policy is only exacerbated when you consider the compounded effect of the other actions Trump has taken. The administration slashed the foreign aid budget to ribbons, leading to a projected spike in deaths worldwide. Thousands of applicants from the Global South who were told to wait in line have been shunted to the back in favor of an unoppressed minority whose skin just happens to be the right color for this administration.
None of this is meant to directly shame the white South African immigrants who have taken advantage of this policy. The opportunity to emigrate to the U.S. is a dream shared by millions across the world, so it is hard to fault them for taking an opportunity when presented to them. Their new communities should welcome them with open arms, as all newly arrived immigrants should be. It’s hard not to hope, however, that there is a twinge of introspection in the back of their minds when they tell the story of how they came to be so fortunate as to find themselves in America.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.