As the Trump administration faces multiple lawsuits over its rescission of temporary protected status for people of various nationalities who are fleeing legitimate strife in their countries, it’s preparing to roll out the red carpet for a new group it has designated as refugees: white South Africans who say they’ve been discriminated against by their country’s anti-apartheid government.
The MAGA movement — including Trump and his top campaign donor, Elon Musk, who is himself a native of South Africa — has spent years peddling the claim that South Africa has discriminated against white people as it has sought to correct the racist wrongs inflicted on Black South Africans during the apartheid era. The argument is not far removed from the one embraced by some white nationalists, who look to ex-colonial Africa for dubious claims of anti-white oppression.
The New York Times reports Trump is preparing to welcome 54 white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, on Sunday.
According to the New York Times:
The Trump administration is planning to bring the first group of white South Africans it has classified as refugees to the United States on Monday, according to officials briefed on the plans and documents obtained by The New York Times. Although the president halted virtually all other refugee admissions shortly after he took office in January, his administration hastily put together a program to allow in white South Africans, who he claims have been the victims of racial persecution in their home country. The administration plans to send government officials to Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia for an event marking the arrival of the South Africans ... according to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services.
This news (which has not been verified by MSNBC or NBC News) dropped on Thursday — the same day the administration asked the Supreme Court to allow it to rescind deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan immigrants. It has already rescinded TPS for Afghan and Cameroonian refugees, as well. All of these decisions are being challenged in court, and the racial overtones seem like they should be clear to anyone willing to see them. (One might note that Trump was also reportedly weighing revocation of TPS for Ukrainian refugees but has not done so, to date.)
Trump, who launched his political career with a bigoted diatribe in which he characterized Mexican immigrants as drug-pushers and rapists, has built a movement largely centered around white grievance politics. And he reaffirmed his allegiance to that effort last year when he vowed to crack down on what he called “anti-white feeling” in the U.S. if elected president — even though anti-white discrimination doesn’t exist in any systemic way. The administration importing white South Africans suggests an attempt to globalize his pro-white agenda.