As President Donald Trump tries to bar almost all refugees from entering the country, his administration is planning to use federal funds reserved for sick, elderly, and at-risk refugee populations to facilitate an influx of white South Africans within days, according to a government source and an internal memo viewed by The Lever.
The first group of Dutch-descended Afrikaners is scheduled to arrive in the United States imminently, and they will be receiving emergency support from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the memo, which was signed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and Office of Refugee Resettlement assistant secretary Andrew Gradison.
The move follows Trump’s February executive order demanding humanitarian reduction for Afrikaners. Trump booster Elon Musk — himself a South African immigrant — has stated South Africa’s authorities was unfair and racist to white individuals.
For the reason that govt order, U.S. officers have been interviewing white South African candidates who declare to have confronted racial discrimination in postapartheid South Africa. On the identical time, refugees from the remainder of the world, a few of whom have been ready for years to enter the nation, have been left in limbo after Trump in January suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, affecting an estimated 20,000 refugees set to journey to the U.S. — together with 12,000 who already had flights booked. That ban is at the moment being challenged in court docket.
Within the April 30 memo, which has not beforehand been reported, officers with the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement wrote to Kennedy, requesting approval for the “mobilization of quick assist for weak incoming Afrikaner refugees,” together with “housing, well being providers, and resettlement assist upon their arrival.”
The group of Afrikaners, officers wrote, was slated to reach “inside a couple of days of this memo,” and due to this fact officers wanted approval to make emergency preparations outdoors of typical refugee resettlement protocol.
Kennedy signed and accredited the doc that day.
In line with a authorities supply conversant in the plans, the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement has preliminary preparations to make use of funds from a program called Preferred Communities to resettle the Afrikaners. This system’s web site notes that it’s for essentially the most weak refugees arriving within the U.S., together with “these with critical medical situations, girls in danger, and aged refugees.”
The company is making ready to resettle as many as 1,000 Afrikaners this yr, the supply stated.
A spokesperson for the Division of Well being and Human Providers responded to a request for remark after publication and confirmed that Most popular Communities program funding could be utilized in resettling Afrikaners.
Final month, U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) launched legislation to acknowledge Afrikaners as Precedence 2 refugees — a designation that they’re “of particular humanitarian concern,” in response to the U.S. State Department. Although that laws has not handed, the Trump administration memo asserts powers in “emergency circumstances [to] present help to refugees with out regard to pick out legal guidelines and laws.”
The usage of any refugee resettlement funds — for weak refugees or not — to assist white South Africans has drawn fierce outcry. Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, codified the nation’s apartheid racial segregation system in 1948 and subsequently subjected the nation’s Black inhabitants to mass evictions and brutal segregation.
White South Africans, as the tip of apartheid neared within the early Nineteen Nineties, owned the vast majority of the nation’s land. Even many years after the tip of the apartheid system, white South Africans nonetheless personal more than 70 percent of the nation’s agricultural land, regardless of making up lower than 10 % of the general inhabitants. The federal government’s efforts at land redistribution — together with a new January land reform law — are designed to deal with this disparity.
In his February order, Trump claimed that Afrikaners have been “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” in addition to “racially discriminatory property confiscation,” and demanded that U.S. officers draft plans to supply reduction, together with refugee resettlement, to Afrikaners.
Afrikaners have been vocal supporters of Trump, and Musk, who grew up in South Africa below apartheid, has been a vocal opponent of what he calls “racist possession legal guidelines,” within the nation. Musk shouldn’t be himself Afrikaner however descended from more moderen British and Canadian white settlers within the nation.
Musk has additionally been vocal about alleged violence in opposition to white South African farmers, claiming in 2023 that “they’re really killing white farmers day by day.” The nation’s courts have discovered that such claims are baseless.
Within the days after Trump’s order was issued in February, senior White Home officers met with AfriForum, a strong group that advocates for South Africa’s Afrikaner minority. The group reportedly requested that Trump intervene in South Africa’s land expropriation coverage on behalf of white South Africans.
Although AfriForum formally rejected Trump’s provide of refugee standing to Afrikaners, a reported 8,200 Afrikaners have independently expressed curiosity within the provide.
On the identical time, Trump has been making an attempt to freeze all different refugee admissions into the nation, together with for these fleeing violence and persecution within the Congo, Afghanistan, and Sudan.
On Monday, a federal decide ordered the federal government to allow 12,000 refugees, all those that had already made journey plans to the U.S., into the nation.
However even when the Trump administration complies with that order, hundreds extra asylum-seekers in the course of an arduous, yearslong approval course of can be left stranded — all whereas the administration welcomes Afrikaners with open arms.
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