The Trump administration welcomed a group of 59 white Afrikaners to Washington, D.C., on Monday — after President Donald Trump spent years hurling anti-migrant rhetoric.
The federal government gave the migrants refugee status, despite it blocking the entry of refugees of color from regions that range from Central America, South America, the Middle East, and Asia — migrants who have also gone through years of vetting.
Trump and his allies have argued the Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, have faced discrimination and violence because of their background and Christian religion — a claim that Elon Musk, a white South African himself, has pushed.
“It’s genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” President Trump said to the media Monday at an unrelated news conference.
South Africa’s government has denied claims that Afrikaners — whose ancestors pushed and benefited from apartheid — face discrimination.
From the very beginning of his first presidential campaign, Trump has denounced migrants — including refugees who are fleeing war and persecution — as dangerous criminals, rapists, terrorists, and harming the culture of the United States:
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about migrants during a December 2023 campaign speech.
“These are stone-cold killers,” Trump also said about migrants during a September 2024 campaign speech. “They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
“They don’t speak the language. They don’t have the culture, different culture, whole different culture, everything’s different,” Trump said in the same September 30 speech, as he denigrated the Haitian immigrant population in Springfield, Ohio. “Your towns, your cities, your country is being destroyed.”
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said at the very beginning of his 2015 presidential campaign. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
