President Trump has instituted the most dramatic retrenchment of the country’s refugee program in decades, largely walling off the United States to anyone fleeing war and persecution.
But Mr. Trump has made one notable carve out: Since last year, Afrikaners, the white minority from South Africa, have had the rare ability to seek refugee status.
Now the administration is considering substantially expanding access for the white South Africans by declaring that an “unforeseen emergency” in that country warrants more than doubling the number who could enter as refugees, according to multiple people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The New York Times.
The move could bring thousands of additional Afrikaners to the United States, on top of the roughly 6,000 who have entered the country so far this fiscal year, the vast majority among all refugees allowed entry.
Mr. Trump and his aides have claimed Afrikaners face racial persecution, an assertion strongly disputed by South African officials. Now, the administration is weighing whether to expand the program by arguing that South Africa’s response to Mr. Trump’s claims of persecution, the rhetoric of political leaders and what it calls the disruption of the Afrikaner refugee program constitute an emergency that requires resettling even more white minorities in the United States, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
Mr. Trump has not yet made a final decision on expanding access for Afrikaners, although he has shown no sign of backing away from the program. White House officials have started making preparations to bring a group of resettled Afrikaners to the White House to celebrate World Refugee Day in June, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
The use of the emergency determination would be a major step in the president’s effort to transform a program that for decades amounted to a pathway for those fleeing war, famine and natural disaster around the globe and turn it essentially into a pipeline for mostly white people hoping to immigrate to the United States.
“There are so many countries with very legitimate claims for refugees — the doors are being slammed in all of their faces,” said Elizabeth Shackelford, a former diplomat who worked in Poland, South Sudan and Somalia before resigning in protest of Mr. Trump’s first presidency. “The reason for the sympathy from this administration is because it sends a very clear message: ‘We will not tolerate white ethnic people being treated as if they are not special.’”
The White House referred requests for comment to the State Department. A department official, who was not authorized to comment on the internal discussions, said the administration was prioritizing Afrikaners who were escaping “government-sponsored, race-based discrimination.”
The discussions to expand the program comes despite signs of discontent among some of the Afrikaners who have resettled in the United States.
A number of South Africans have complained about the slow pace of receiving benefits and support from a refugee system that has been gutted by Mr. Trump, according to a resettlement agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal reports.
A handful have even gone back to South Africa after struggling to get their relatives to join them in the United States, officials said — an experience common for many refugees who came before them.
Mr. Trump moved last year to upend the refugee program to effectively prioritize white people. The president suspended refugee admissions for every country besides South Africa early in the year and in October lowered the ceiling of refugee admissions to just 7,500 for this fiscal year, down from the cap of 125,000 set by the Biden administration in 2024. The limited number of slots were reserved for Afrikaners, who are primarily of Dutch descent, as well as some other South African minorities.
At the same time, administration officials have discussed sending Afghan refugees who are seeking entry to the United States after assisting the American war effort in their country to the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the administration been scrutinizing some refugees who have resettled in the United States but have not yet applied for their green cards.
Mr. Trump’s changes have had a dramatic effect.
The United States let in just 6,069 refugees for the fiscal year through the end of April, closely approaching the annual cap, according to government data released earlier this week. Three were from Afghanistan; the rest were from South Africa. In comparison, just over 100,000 refugees were admitted to the United States in fiscal year 2024.
Many of the refugees were welcomed to the United States in a matter of months, while applicants for the refugee program have often waited years in camps around the world because of a backlog of cases and a lengthy security vetting process.
The administration’s policy has left other refugees in war-torn nations stranded and prompted Afghan allies to question whether their sacrifice for the U.S. military will ever be repaid.
Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican governor of Arkansas who pushed his state legislature to welcome refugees in 2020, said the “blunt moratorium” on the program has resulted in “common heartache” for many families.
“You might have one of our allies coming out of Afghanistan that helped the United States that is stuck there and cannot have the protection that was promised to them by the United States of America, and then you got previous refugees that were here and their family members are still placed in a refugee camp,” Mr. Hutchinson said.
The special status that the Trump administration has granted Afrikaners, he added, “didn’t make any sense.”
Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that Afrikaners are being targeted in “a genocide.” The administration has also publicly attacked the South African government on issues like government land seizures and laws meant to redress the legacy of apartheid.
The president has sought to punish South Africa with high tariffs, cutting aid to the country and deploying U.S. refugee officers to the African nation to help the Afrikaners with resettlement.
Presidents typically set a new ceiling for refugee admissions at the end of the fiscal year after consulting with Congress, as required by law. But the administration is now preparing to fast-track that process by citing an emergency to raise the 7,500 cap by another 10,000 slots far earlier — potentially in the coming weeks, according to officials and documents.
After a year of diplomatic feuding with South Africa, the limited number of openings would once again be reserved mostly for white South Africans.
Reuters reported earlier on the consideration of a new refugee ceiling. The discussions to use an emergency determination to expand the program has not been previously reported.
Past presidents have invoked the emergency determination to expand the number of refugees admitted into the country, including President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who used it to raise the refugee ceiling from what had been a record low, set by Mr. Trump in his first administration. The Reagan and Bush administrations cited an emergency to bring in additional refugees from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fleeing persecution.
The Trump administration is now preparing to cite “negative rhetoric on the part of the government of South Africa and leaders of prominent political parties in South Africa” as one possible reason for the new refugee emergency designation, according to government documents.
Administration officials have pointed to a South African opposition political party’s embrace of the chant “Kill the Boer!” as evidence of the targeting of the white minority. The chant, which refers to Afrikaners, had its origins in Black South Africans’ fight against the country’s violent, racist government in the apartheid era. The ruling party, the African National Congress, has distanced itself from the slogan.
When South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last year, the American president surprised him with a video featuring the chant, as well as misleading images that he falsely claimed were evidence of a genocide against white South African farmers.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and white farmers have been killed in vicious acts of violence in the country. But police data does not support evidence of genocide or the idea that white South Africans are more likely to be targeted than any other group.
During apartheid, the government denied Black South Africans the right to own prime agricultural land. That meant that almost all of the country’s large-scale commercial farmers were white, and that remains so to this day.
White South Africans have much higher employment rates, lower poverty rates and more lucrative wages than their Black counterparts.
Mr. Ramaphosa has called Mr. Trump’s Afrikaner policy “racist.” The U.S. ambassador to South Africa, L. Brent Bozell III, has accused Mr. Ramaphosa of “insulting our president.”
The administration is also considering citing the “disruption” of the U.S. refugee operation in South Africa as evidence of the emergency need, according to documents obtained by The Times.
Administration officials were particularly frustrated when South African law enforcement officials in December raided a facility in Johannesburg where refugee applications for Afrikaners were being processed. The State Department accused the South African government of detaining U.S. officials and publicly releasing their passport information.
South Africa denied those claims, saying that in the operation they had arrested Kenyans who had been working illegally at the processing center.
“This is exhausting,” said Vincent Magwenya, a spokesman for the South African president, said of the Trump administration’s argument that there is an emergency involving the persecution of Afrikaners. “If U.S. taxpayers are happy and satisfied with their tax dollars being spent on lies and falsehoods of the so-called ‘Afrikaner refugee’ program, that’s not our business.”
Mr. Magwenya noted that some of the Afrikaners who took advantage of the refugee program have since returned to South Africa. At least three made the return after being settled in states like Minnesota, Idaho and Illinois, according to government documents.
They returned to South Africa for a range of reasons, including difficulties in bringing their relatives to the United States and wanting to be with sick family members back home. Another Afrikaner returned because “resettlement occurred quickly,” according to a government document, and “she had not thoroughly thought through the process.”
Zimasa Matiwane and John Eligon in Johannesburg, South Africa, contributed reporting.
