South Africans land in U.S. after offered refugee status by Trump administration

The first group of Afrikaners landed at Washington Dulles International Airport on Monday after the Trump administration offered refugee status to White South Africans, citing the discrimination they face.

The group of 49 South Africans were made up of families, including small children. They were greeted by Christopher Landau, deputy secretary of state, and Troy Edgar, the deputy homeland security secretary.

“It is such an honor for us to receive you here today. This is the land of the free,” Mr. Landau said as he greeted the group.

“It makes me so happy to see you with our flag in your hands and that flag symbolizes liberty for so many of us,” he said before talking about his family’s own emigration history — his father was an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis before World War II.

He noted that many of the 49 are farmers, a group whose land the South African government is accused of targeting for expropriation and of turning a blind eye to Black mob violence against.

“When you have quality seeds, you can put them in foreign soil and they will blossom. They will bloom,” he said. “We are excited to welcome you here to our country where we think you will bloom.”

President Trump said earlier Monday in the White House that he has expedited refugee status for Afrikaners because “they’re being killed.”

“We don’t want to see people be killed,” he said

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Mr. Trump said. “Farmers are being killed. They happen to be White, but whether they’re White or Black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

The president said he doesn’t care about “their race, their color, I don’t care about their height, their weight, I don’t care about anything.”

“I just know that what’s happening is terrible,” he said.

Mr. Trump took special interest in the Afrikaners’ situation not long after he took office.

In February, he signed an executive order suspending all foreign assistance to South Africa, which he accused of racist discrimination.

“This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners,” the executive order said.

“In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements,” it said.

The order calls out the Expropriation Act, which was signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Mr. Trump’s South African-born close adviser Elon Musk also has attacked the law as racist.

The law makes it easier for land to be expropriated in the public interest, which has made the Afrikaner farmers fearful of losing their land.

The Afrikaners are an ethnic group descended from colonial-era Dutch and German settlers in South Africa, a group distinct from the English-speaking Whites such as Mr. Musk. The Afrikaners were the driving force behind the apartheid system of racial segregation that reigned in the country in the mid- and late 20th century.

South Africa’s Black-majority government passed the law in response to land-distribution inequalities left over from apartheid. White South Africans make up around 7% of the country’s population but own more than three-quarters of the private farmland in South Africa.

But the government has said any claims of persecution against White Afrikaners is “completely false.”

“The South Africa Police Services statistics on farm-related crimes do not support allegations of violent crime targeted at farmers generally or any particular race,” the country’s Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation said in a recent statement.

“There are sufficient structures available within South Africa to address concerns of discrimination. Moreover, even if there are allegations of discrimination, it is our view that these do not meet the threshold of persecution required under domestic and international refugee law,” the Ministry stated.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters Friday that what the Afrikaners face “fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.”

Mr. Trump suspended all refugee admissions on his first day in office. However, the Afrikaners waited no more than three months to be approved for refugee status.