US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

Even as President Donald Trump has attempted to block thousands of refugees from places like Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan from entering the US, he’s made a unique and pointed exception for one particular group: Afrikaners.

Last week, Trump welcomed 59 Afrikaners to the US as refugees, alleging that they’d suffered racial persecution in their home country, a claim the South African government has vehemently denied. The group — one of two white minorities in South Africa — are descended primarily from Dutch colonists and are known for their role in establishing apartheid, a system of segregation that oppressed Black South Africans for decades.

Trump — and incoming Afrikaner refugees — say they’ve been targeted because of their race, and that they now face violence and government land seizures as a result. Experts and South African officials, meanwhile, counter that there’s scant evidence for such allegations, and that the group remains one of the wealthiest and most economically privileged in the entire country.

Trump’s admission of Afrikaners marks a sharp contrast with how refugees from other parts of the world have been treated: In January, the White House suspended refugee admissions indefinitely, arguing that the US didn’t have the capacity to absorb more people. More recently, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has defended singling out Afrikaners by saying that the “US has the right to prioritise … who [it wants],” and that the administration is focused on admitting people who can be “assimilated easily.”

The blatant double standard underscores how this policy ties into Trump’s broader messaging, which has long focused on stoking white grievances and resentment. Specifically, Trump has framed the incoming Afrikaner refugees as white victims who have been mistreated by a majority-Black South African government – and population – that’s out to take what’s theirs. That echoes longstanding fears conservatives have propagated about the racist and conspiratorial “Great Replacement Theory” — the idea that there’s a calculated plan to displace white people with people of color.

To put it bluntly: Trump’s plans and priorities regarding refugees and immigration are steeped in white supremacy.

The president is “positioning himself as a sort of savior of white America and of white Christianity globally,” said Loren Landau, a migration expert at the University of Oxford and South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand.

Who are Afrikaners?

Afrikaners first settled in South Africa in the 1600s and more recently came to power when the right-wing Afrikaner-led National Party won the country’s elections in 1948.

During that contest, the National Party – which was desperate to maintain a system of cheap, Black labour – ran on a platform of institutionalising segregation and went on to impose the system of apartheid. That included a series of racist laws that segregated basic services like public bathrooms and buses, regulated where Black South Africans could live and travel and denied Black South Africans the right to vote.

After nearly four decades of economic sanctions and protests, the Afrikaner National Party was removed in 1994 when South Africa held its first democratic election and chose Nelson Mandela as its president.

“ Afrikaners and other white people were allowed to stay in South Africa. They were allowed to keep almost all of their property and most of their privilege,” said Landau of the conditions that Afrikaners experienced in the years since.

Today, Afrikaners comprise roughly 5% of South Africa’s population and are still considered........

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