MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In February, President Trump signed an executive order telling white Afrikaans South Africans they could apply for refugee status in the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The South African situation is very, very dangerous and very bad for a lot of people.
KELLY: The South African government disagreed, saying Afrikaners, who are the descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, are still one of the most privileged groups in the country. Well, three months on, the first group of Afrikaners is set to arrive on U.S. soil on Monday. I want to bring in Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg. Hey there, Kate.
KATE BARTLETT, BYLINE: Hello, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Hi. So what more do we know about the arrival plans for this group?
BARTLETT: Well, three off-the-record sources have told me that about 54 Afrikaners have been interviewed and granted refugee status in the U.S. These three government sources don't wish to be named because they're not authorized to speak to the media. What we know at the moment is that a group of South Africans will be arriving on Monday at Dulles Airport. There, they will be greeted with fanfare by senior government officials, and a press conference is scheduled to be held. And after that, they'll be sent to their final destinations for resettlement, which include a long list of states across the country.
KELLY: Across the country - but hold up, I am confused because didn't the Trump administration suspend refugee resettlement?
BARTLETT: Yes. My sources say it's really unusual for refugee interviews to be conducted so quickly and also for U.S. officials to greet their plane. And as you mentioned, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order suspending nearly all refugee resettlement programs. Some people have been waiting for years to travel to the U.S., but now this group of white refugees have been granted access. This is what Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, a resettlement agency, had to say.
KRISH O'MARA VIGNARAJAH: Thousands of refugees from around the world have been left in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel, including Afghan wartime allies, religious minorities and other families facing extreme persecution.
BARTLETT: I sought comment from the State Department, who told me to contact the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. The bureau has not responded, and my questions emailed to the U.S. embassy in South Africa also went unanswered.
KELLY: Do we know, Kate, how South Africa captured President Trump's attention in the first place?
BARTLETT: Well, South Africa has been in the Trump administration's crosshairs since he returned to office. The president, his South African-born adviser Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have all accused the South African government, without evidence, of persecuting the white minority, especially Afrikaners, a lot of whom are farmers. This all comes after the South African government passed a land reform bill earlier this year allowing for expropriation without compensation in rare instances. So far, no land has been confiscated. But Afrikaner rights groups have been lobbying the U.S. government, saying they feel under threat from high crime rates and attacks on their remote farms, and they seem to have caught Trump's ear.
KELLY: So what is South Africa - what is the government there saying to all this?
BARTLETT: Simply put, the South African government has been dismayed by this broadside against them from a country it's long considered an ally. The government here had been trying to walk a fine diplomatic line between correcting what it calls, quote, "the misinformation" the Trump administration is acting on and not alienating Washington further. The government here says Afrikaners are still among the most privileged groups in the country. Thirty years after the end of apartheid, white South Africans, who account for about 7% of the population here, still own the vast majority of commercial farmland.
KELLY: We're going to leave it there. That's Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg.
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.3