By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is aiming to bring the first group of white South Africans to the United States via its refugee program as soon as next week, three people familiar with the matter said, a divisive effort given that Trump has been blocking refugee admissions from the rest of the world.
The Trump administration aims to fly the initial cohort of about 50 Afrikaners into Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, two of the people said, requesting anonymity to share internal plans. The group would participate in a press conference at the airport and then board flights to their U.S. destinations, the sources said.
The sources cautioned that their arrival had already been delayed a week and that the plans could change. As of Thursday afternoon, a charter plane intended to ferry them to the U.S. had not secured a landing permit, one source said.
The U.S. State Department, which administers the resettlement of South Africans whom the Trump administration granted refugee status, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. NPR first reported the timing of the arrivals.
Trump kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown after taking office in January, including an indefinite suspension of refugee resettlement. In a related executive order, the Republican president said the U.S. would only admit refugees who “can fully and appropriately assimilate.”
Despite the broad refugee freeze, Trump in February called on the U.S. to prioritize resettling Afrikaners, descendants of mostly Dutch early settlers, saying they were “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
The assertion that minority white South Africans face discrimination from the Black majority has spread in far-right circles for years and been echoed by Trump’s white South African-born ally Elon Musk.
The average white household in South Africa owns 20 times the wealth of the average Black household, according to the Review of Political Economy, an international academic journal.
In interviews with U.S. immigration officers, white South Africans seeking refugee status have highlighted troubles with land disputes, crime and perceived racism, Reuters reported in April.
The South African government has criticized the Trump effort, saying it fails to recognize the country’s history of colonialism and apartheid.
“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” South Africa’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement on Friday.
Stephen Miller, a top White House official and the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, defended the program while speaking to reporters, saying the situation “fits the textbook definition” of race-based persecution.
While some Afrikaners have expressed interest in moving to politically conservative U.S. states, Democratic-leaning Minnesota has emerged as a popular choice, two of the sources told Reuters.
Minnesota has a reputation as a welcoming state for refugees, including those from Somalia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Some also plan to head to Republican-leaning states, such as Idaho and Alabama, one of the sources said.
The reason to charter a flight for the initial group of Afrikaners was not immediately clear. The charter plane would cost far more than commercial tickets, sources said.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Additional reporting by Catherine Schenck, Harshita Meenaktshi and Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Himani Sarkar, Stephen Coates, Tomasz Janowski and Daniel Wallis)
