A plane carrying dozens of white South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport on Monday, said a state department manager after the Trump administration granted them refugee status in the United States.
The group – which includes families with children – was welcomed at the airport in the DC region by US officials, including deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau and the assistant secretary of internal security Troy Edgar. Landau told journalists that the group had faced “blatant discrimination” in South Africa – which the country’s government denied.
Landau said newcomers had been “carefully checked” in South Africa before their arrival. They left the country’s capital From Johannesburg via a charter plane on Sunday.
Earlier this year, President Trump managed his government Authorize South Africans of European origin – in particular Afrikaners, who are largely descended from the Dutch settlers – to be reinstalled by the American refugee program.
The administration and its allies, including the billionaire of South African origin Elon Musk, allege The members of the White Minority of South Africa have been faced with discrimination by the post-apartheid government of the country, including through a controversial law which allows the government to take private land in certain circumstances.
Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images
“South Africa confiscates land and deals very badly certain classes of people,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in February.
The South African government has firmly denied discrimination and maintains that the land crisis law respects private property rights and Only target land which is not used or does not serve the public interest. Land ownership has has long been a sensitive problem In South Africa, which was led by its white minority under the apartheid system until the mid -1990s.
“It is ironic that the decree does not provide for refugee status in the United States for a group in South Africa which remains among the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the United States for other parts of the world are expelled and refused by asylum despite real difficulties,” said the Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa in a February statement.
Landau has also cited attacks on South African farmers in recent years, saying that new arrivals had been confronted with “glaring and targeted threats”. The South African government arguments Attacks in the country’s rural agricultural communities are not racily targeted and are part of the broader crime problem in South Africa.
The Trump administration also faced the South African government on foreign policy, including its Criticism of Israel. Mr. Trump signed a decree In February, ordering his government to suspend aid to South Africa.
South Africans moved in the refugee process To an unusually rapid clip, arriving in the United States after a few months, even if the process frequently takes years.
They also arrived in the United States despite a wider effort by the Trump administration to suspend the refugee admission program – a decision that fired Judicial disputes.
The group of refugees decreases to help reinstall South Africans
The federal government is generally based on non-profit organizations to help reinstall refugees in the United States, but at least one group, the ministries of episcopal migration, said on Monday that it would not contribute to the South African arrivals.
Episcopal bishop Sean Rowe said the government Informed the group – which receives federal subsidies – that it should help the South Africans. The group has chosen not to help and will rather finish its work with the government, he said, citing “the group’s unshakable commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.
“It was painful to watch a group of refugees, selected in a very unusual way, to receive preferential treatment on many others who have been waiting in refugee or dangerous conditions for years,” Rowe said in a statement.
Some other refugee resettlement groups said they were willing to work with the South Africans.
CEO of Church World Service, Rick Santos, criticized the government for restricting most other admissions to refugees, but said that the group “remained determined to serve all eligible refugee populations asking security in the United States, including Afrikaners who are eligible for services”, in a statement to the Associated Press.