The first white South Africans granted refugee status by U.S. President Donald Trump left for the U.S. from Johannesburg on Sunday.
Reuters reports seeing some white citizens in a queue with airport trolleys full of suitcases waiting to have their passports stamped before entering the departure lounge.
A US-funded charter plane carried the first group of 49 passengers on Sunday. “The application for the permit [to land] said it’s the Afrikaners who are relocating to the USA as refugees,” a South African Transport Ministry spokesperson Collen Msibi said.
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Afrikaners, who ruled South Africa during the repressive apartheid regime, are a white ethnic minority with mostly Dutch, German and French settlers. They make up almost 60% of South Africa’s white population.
Trump stated in an executive order in February that Afrikaners were victims of “racial discrimination”. Meanwhile, analysts say that Afrikaners have been one of the most privileged races in South Africa since the end of apartheid.
Even though white South Africans make up around 7% of the country’s population, they own some 78% of private farmland in the country, with most of the workers on such farms being Black.
Trump’s executive order in February offers resettlement to “Afrikaner refugees” who face “government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
Trump has insisted that the South African government is seizing land from white farmers without any compensation — a claim the Southern African government has denied.
Trump further mentioned “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, meanwhile, a report by the South African police shows that out of 44 murders recorded on farms and smaller plots of agricultural land in 2024, eight of the victims were farmers.
Afrikaner author Max du Preez told the BBC that Trump’s stance had more to do with “internal politics” in the U.S. than South Africa. Since assuming office, Trump has cut all U.S. financial assistance to South Africa after criticizing the Southern African nation’s land policy and its genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Israel.
In March, the U.S. State Department said it had received some 8,000 inquiries from white South Africans for resettlement.
About 1,000 Afrikaners could be admitted to the United States this year, according to the Trump administration, which halted mostly non-white refugee admissions from the rest of the world since taking office.
The first group headed to the U.S. is expected to arrive in Washington DC later on Monday, before continuing to Texas.
