President Donald Trump closed America’s doors to refugees worldwide through an executive order on the first day of his second term on Jan. 20. But then he issued a new order just 18 days later to make one exception: for white Afrikaners from South Africa. The language of this order suggests it arises from Trump’s objection to various South African domestic and foreign policies, including a recently signed law on land expropriation, which the order describes as “racially discriminatory.” Trump’s favored adviser, Elon Musk, a White immigrant from South Africa, posted on his social media platform X four days before the executive order that South Africa has “racist ownership laws.”
The new South African law makes no mention of a landowner’s race, though patterns of land ownership are inextricably bound up with the legacy of racial apartheid in South Africa, in which Whites, who were in the minority, not only controlled political power but also owned the vast majority of privately held land, as they continue to do to this day. The expropriation law regulates when private land can be taken for public use and under what circumstances land could be expropriated without compensation. No land has, as yet, been expropriated without compensation.
Together, the two Trump executive orders halt all refugee resettlement, including for people already cleared to come to the United States, except for Afrikaners. The second order also bars any continued financial assistance to South Africa. One case in which a federal judge this week temporarily blocked the first executive order illustrates the intersection of all these variables and why such impetuous decisions as the signing of these executive orders are not only egregious on their face but also unlawful, as Congress established the U.S. refugee admissions program in the Refugee Act of 1980, which can’t be undone by executive order.
The first executive order that has now been put on hold was euphemistically entitled “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program.” Among the refugees left stranded by what essentially was a U.S. suspension of admissions for refugees worldwide was “Josephine,” who as a young child fled violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Because conditions for a single, teenage girl were dangerous in the refugee camp in Tanzania, her mother made the difficult decision to send Josephine to South Africa when she reached age 15. In 2016, her mother was resettled to the United States, became a U.S. citizen, and petitioned for Josephine to reunite with her.
Josephine was finally approved, and in January had all the required travel documents in hand to board a flight to the United States, awaiting only the confirmation from the U.S. consulate in Johannesburg that she had permission to travel to the United States as a refugee. She had packed her bags, given away her other belongings, and terminated her lease.
As documented in the lawsuit filed by three faith-based refugee assistance agencies and nine individual plaintiffs, including Josephine and her mother, the U.S. consulate refused to grant the required flight confirmation. Now Josephine, age 28, is stranded in South Africa with no prospect of reuniting with her mother and worse off than before.
Executive Order `Lacks Factual Accuracy’
The South African government issued a press release in response to the Feb. 7 executive order, saying that it “lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid.” It also pointed out the irony “that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”
The initial media reports coming out of South Africa show head scratching if not outright opposition from the very Afrikaners the order is intended to favor. Reuters quoted Neville van der Merwe, a 78-year-old pensioner in Bothasig near Cape Town, saying, “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?”
So, is there a need for Afrikaner refugee resettlement? According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 122.6 million forcibly displaced people worldwide in 2024, of whom 37.9 million were refugees. UNHCR said 2.4 million of those refugees needed to be resettled, but it was only able to resettle a small fraction, 116,528, in 2024.
A breakdown of that number reveals that 22,615 were resettled from Josephine’s home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but UNHCR does not list a single refugee as having been resettled from South Africa as their country of origin — whether Afrikaans-speaking Whites, English-speaking Whites, Afrikaans-speaking non-Whites, or any of the myriad other racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups living in South Africa.
Resettlement Plunged During First Trump Term
Both Trump’s statements and his actions during his first term and since returning to office suggest that this order reflects his preoccupations and prejudices rather than an objective assessment of the need for refugee resettlement for the group in question. In an Oval Office meeting with U.S. senators during his first administration, Trump was widely quoted as saying that the U.S. should admit more immigrants from places like Norway rather than from “shithole” countries like Haiti and “people from Africa.”
And that is just what he did. U.S. refugee resettlement data for fiscal year 2018 show that refugee admissions plunged to 20 percent of the average levels of the previous five years for refugees from the Middle East and South Asia and to 33 percent of previous levels for refugees from African countries. But resettlement from a handful of white Christian-majority European countries rose over that time, up 109 percent for Ukrainians and 134 percent for Russians. Remember this was three years before the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion that caused millions of Ukrainians to flee.
The U.S. refugee admissions program dates from the end of the Vietnam War, with strong support from both Republican and Democratic presidents. Then, as now, it not only has served to save people like Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who served side-by-side with U.S. armed forces and had to flee their countries as a consequence, but also has rescued refugees fleeing for their lives from many of the most horrible scenes of mass atrocities of the last 50 years, such as in Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia, and Myanmar. And that was without racial or religious discrimination.
Refugee resettlement has been a lifeline as well as a beacon of hope and a sign to the world that people in a far-off place – Americans — care. This president, however, has cut that lifeline and extinguished the hope. His actions risk showing the world instead that any semblance of capacity to care appears to be limited for those who look like him.
Some people, however, are taking action. The lawsuit in Josephine’s case is one such step. On Feb. 25, a federal district judge in Seattle issued a preliminary injunction in the case that temporarily blocks the administration from cutting funding for refugee resettlement. This opens the way for the public to put broader pressure on members of Congress and the White House to make the case that refugee resettlement needs to be saved.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions