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‘Mission South Africa’: How Trump Is Offering White Afrikaners Refugee Status

Published

1 year ago

March 30, 2025

‘Mission South Africa’: How Trump Is Offering White Afrikaners Refugee Status

Almost immediately after taking office, President Trump began shutting down refugee resettlement programs, slashing billions of dollars in funding and making it all but impossible for people from scores of countries to seek haven in the United States.

With one exception.

The Trump administration has thrown open the doors to white Afrikaners from South Africa, establishing a program called “Mission South Africa” to help them come to the United States as refugees, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under Phase One of the program, the United States has deployed multiple teams to convert commercial office space in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, into ad hoc refugee centers, according to the documents. The teams are studying more than 8,200 requests expressing interest in resettling to the United States and have already identified 100 Afrikaners who could be approved for refugee status. The government officials have been directed to focus particularly on screening white Afrikaner farmers.

The administration has also provided security escorts to officials conducting the interviews of potential refugees.

By mid-April, U.S. officials on the ground in South Africa will “propose long-term solutions, to ensure the successful implementation of the president’s vision for the dignified resettlement of eligible Afrikaner applicants,” according to one memo sent from the embassy in Pretoria to the State Department in Washington this month.

The administration’s focus on white Afrikaners comes as it effectively bans the entry of other refugees — including about 20,000 people from countries like Afghanistan, Congo and Syria who were ready to travel to the United States before Mr. Trump took office. In court filings about those other refugees, the administration has argued that core functions of the refugee program had been “terminated” after the president’s ban, so it did not have the resources to take in any more people.

“There’s no subtext and nothing subtle about the way this administration’s immigration and refugee policy has obvious racial and racist overtones,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice. “While they seek to single out Afrikaners for special treatment, they simultaneously want us to think mostly Black and brown vetted newcomers are dangerous despite their background checks and all evidence to the contrary.”

The program also inserts the United States into a charged debate inside South Africa, where some members of the white Afrikaner minority have begun a campaign to suggest that they are the true victims in post-apartheid South Africa. Under apartheid, a white minority government discriminated against South Africans of color, and brutality and violence flourished, leading to torture, disappearances and murder.

There have been murders of white farmers, the focus of the Afrikaner grievances, but police statistics show they are not any more vulnerable to violent crime than others in the country. In South Africa, more than 90 percent of the population comes from racial groups persecuted by the racist, apartheid regime.

In a statement, the State Department said it was focused on resettling Afrikaners who have been “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” The agency confirmed that it had begun interviewing applicants and said they would need to pass “stringent background and security checks.”

The decision to unleash resources for Afrikaners just starting the refugee process, while stonewalling court demands to process those fleeing other countries who have already been cleared for travel, risks upending an American refugee program that has been the foundation of the United States’ role for the vulnerable, according to resettlement officials.

“The government clearly has the ability to process applications when it wants to,” said Melissa Keaney, a senior supervising attorney for the International Refugee Assistance Project, the group representing plaintiffs trying to restart refugee processing.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order suspending refugee admissions on his first day in office, arguing that welcoming refugees could compromise resources for Americans. He added that future versions of the program should prioritize “only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States.”

A federal judge in Seattle later temporarily blocked that executive order and instructed the administration to restore the refugee program. But the Trump administration still cut contracts with organizations that assist those applying for refugee status overseas, reducing the infrastructure needed to support people seeking refuge in the United States.

An appeals court ruled last week that the administration must admit those thousands of people who were granted refugee status before Mr. Trump entered office, but also declined to stop him from halting the admission of new refugees.

The Justice Department has for weeks deflected demands from refugee advocates accusing the administration of sidestepping the court order and delaying the process of almost every refugee previously granted a ticket to come to the United States. The Trump administration has said it has allowed a limited number of refugees who were vetted to enter the country, although the State Department declined to provide a number.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have argued both that the administration now lacks resources to help thousands of refugees and that in restarting the program the government reserves the right to “do so in a manner that reflects administration priorities.”

Mr. Trump has made clear what those priorities were when he created a refugee carve-out for white Afrikaners. Mr. Trump at the time accused the South African government of confiscating the land of white Afrikaners, backing a long-held conspiracy theory about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.

Mr. Trump was referring to a recent policy signed into law by the South African government, known as the Expropriation Act. It repeals an apartheid-era law and allows the government in certain instances to acquire privately held land in the public interest, without paying compensation, only after a justification process subject to judicial review.

Mr. Trump and his allies have for years echoed the grievances of Afrikaners. During his first term, Mr. Trump directed the State Department to investigate land seizures and “the large-scale killing of farmers.” Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has also falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day.

Despite the claims, white people own half of South Africa’s land while making up just 7 percent of the country’s population. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in the nation.

Ernst Roets, the former executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, which lobbies for international support of the interests of Afrikaners, said many of his peers felt seen by Mr. Trump.

But he said the creation of the new refugee program had elicited debate among Afrikaners. Many do not want to leave their home, Mr. Roets said, but want the United States to back their efforts to claim “self-governance” in South Africa.

“I don’t know anyone — no one I’m aware of — that plans to move to America,” Mr. Roets said. “People who want to come to America, we would support that. If people want to relocate to America, the farmers or Afrikaners, we think they would make good Americans.”

“There’s a good fit,” he added.

Zumbe Baruti, a Congolese refugee living in South Carolina, said he spent decades in a refugee camp in Africa waiting for his turn to be accepted.

“Those white Africans are allowed to enter the United States, but Black Africans are denied entry to the United States,” Mr. Baruti, 29, said in Swahili. He said the pivot away from refugees who have waited in camps for years and to Afrikaners was a form of “discrimination.”

Mr. Baruti, a member of the Bembe people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, fled ethnic violence in the nation when he was a child. He was granted refugee status in 2023, but his wife and three children — the oldest 6 years old and the youngest just 2 — had yet to clear security vetting. He entered the United States two years ago, focused on getting a job, saving money and immediately applying for his family to join him.

When he entered, he said he was told by advisers helping him with his application that his family would most likely join him in two years.

He said that seemed unlikely as Mr. Trump turned his focus elsewhere.

“Regarding my family,” Mr. Baruti said, “hope has diminished.”

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News

Xi’s last frontier: China’s plan to transform its west

Published

1 hour ago

June 1, 2026

Press Room

Xi’s last frontier: China’s plan to transform its west

Additional contributions by Haohsiang Ko, Chris Campbell and Annalee Mather.

The location and route of the tunnel system for the hydropower dam are indicative, as official designs have not been made public. While the route shown is approximate, it follows an elevation change consistent with the proposed plans for the facility.

Mehebub Sahana, an environmental geographer at Manchester University, and Ye Huang, a researcher at Global Energy Monitor, assessed possible locations for the facility and reviewed satellite imagery to determine whether recent construction activity was linked to the project.

Images of major infrastructure projects included at the top of the story, in the order in which they appear: China News Service/Getty Images; CFOTO/Sipa USA; Xinhua/Shutterstock; CFOTO/Sipa USA; Reuters; Xinhua/Shutterstock; CFOTO/Sipa USA; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Shutterstock. Videos from ski resorts in Xinjiang were sourced from China’s Xiaohongshu social media platform.

News

One by one, U.S. civil rights agency dismantles tools to fight discrimination

Published

2 hours ago

June 1, 2026

Press Room

One by one, U.S. civil rights agency dismantles tools to fight discrimination

The EEOC was established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address entrenched discrimination in employment.

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Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

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In 1966, the newly-established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a rule to tackle entrenched discrimination on the job.

Every year, companies with a hundred or more workers would turn over to the government information about the race, ethnicity, sex and job categories of their employees.

This EEO-1 data, as it’s known, has helped the federal agency figure out where people of color and women are not getting hired or promoted. Over decades, the EEOC’s work has led to settlements worth billions.

Now, as part of a realignment of civil rights enforcement under President Trump, the EEOC is seeking to end its annual data collection while also getting rid of a 1979 regulation that allowed employers to take certain steps to address race and gender imbalances revealed by the data.

Together, the moves would mark an about-face in the civil rights agency’s efforts to fulfill its mission.

Andrea Lucas, the Trump-appointed chair of the EEOC, did not respond to NPR’s questions about the two proposals, which have been submitted to the White House for review.

But in interviews and public remarks, Lucas has repeatedly warned that programs or policies aimed at helping specific groups, such as Black people or women, are unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if they exclude others.

“Regardless of what has happened before, the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. The end. Full stop,” Lucas said at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit earlier this month. “I think that that’s a more beautiful vision of our country, and I think it’s consistent with the text of the statute.”

A roadmap for addressing discrimination

The 1979 regulation the EEOC seeks to rescind was issued with this very dilemma in mind: Can a company remedy discrimination by giving special consideration to those who were deprived of opportunities in the past?

The answer back then was yes. The agency gave the go-ahead for mentoring programs and even hiring targets.

“The EEOC says you can take some of these voluntary efforts, even though they will be race- or gender-conscious,” says Chai Feldblum, who served on the commission during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “This is the EEOC giving employers the roadmap of how they can take race and gender into account in a positive way and not violate the law.”

The guidelines, issued in January 1979, made clear that companies first had to document a problem, and then come up with a reasonable and time-limited plan for how to increase the number of minorities or women in their ranks.

Five months later, the Supreme Court embraced that roadmap. In a 5-2 decision known as Weber, the court found that an affirmative action plan to remedy past discrimination was lawful provided it did not “unnecessarily trammel the interests of white employees” and that it was temporary.

In 1987, the court issued another decision, known as Johnson, extending protection to efforts aimed at helping women.

Now known as the Weber-Johnson standard, it’s still the law regardless of what happens with the EEOC’s 1979 regulation, says Feldblum. But for how long, she’s not sure.

“I think the Supreme Court is just waiting for a case that might allow them to overturn those two important cases,” she says.

How data has helped root out discrimination

The more imminent change, assuming the EEOC’s proposals go forward, is the demise of the agency’s annual collection of employee demographics. Usually, the data collection begins in late spring. So far this year, there’s been no word of it.

Since the 1960s, the EEOC has recovered billions of dollars for workers who have suffered discrimination on the job, and in many cases, EEO-1 data played a key role.

“It’s one of the first things that you can look at as you’re trying to learn more,” says Karla Gilbride, who served as the EEOC’s general counsel during the Biden administration.

Protecting U.S. workers from unlawful discrimination — already a hard task — could become significantly harder if the government no longer has that data within arm’s reach, Gilbride says. Having to subpoena data would make enforcement far more laborious and less efficient.

A lawsuit against Bass Pro Shops

Consider the lawsuit against Bass Pro Shops, first filed in 2011.

The EEOC alleged the company, formally known as Bass Pro Outdoor World, discriminated against Black and Hispanic job applicants by not hiring them — not just at one store, but across the country, even in places with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.

“Store by store by store, sort of the same idea, where you had areas that had a significant number of Blacks and Latinos, and either zero or very few at the stores,” says David Lopez, who was the EEOC’s general counsel at the time and now leads the Civil Rights, Migration and Workplace Law Initiative at Arizona State University.

A Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World retail store in Irvine, Calif.

Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

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Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

The EEOC saw that pattern because it had Bass Pro’s demographic data on file. Government investigators could easily compare the outdoor gear shop to other retailers in the same counties. They could also compare Bass Pro’s workforce to the available pool of workers in the surrounding areas.

While the data by itself could not prove discrimination, Lopez says it was a green light to agency investigators to dig further.

“Because they had a reason to investigate, they were able to discover that there were managerial comments that were reflective of discriminatory animus, that they were looking for a certain type of person,” says Lopez.

Someone who was white, according to the government’s complaint.

Bass Pro called the allegations “threadbare” and accused the government of merely relying on “a handful of isolated incidents of alleged inappropriate behavior.”

EEOC investigators later bolstered their case, identifying implicated managers and job applicants by name and compiling a list of dozens of Bass Pro stores with a low representation of Black and Hispanic employees.

Finally, in 2017, the company settled for $10.5 million. Bass Pro did not admit to any wrongdoing, but agreed to appoint a diversity director and to make good-faith efforts to recruit and hire non-white candidates.

Lopez considered the settlement a big win, one of many he oversaw in his time at the EEOC that were built on data.

“You can have a hunch, but there’s nothing like the cold, hard numbers,” he says.

Agency chair says data has been misused

Early indications of the EEOC’s plan to stop gathering data came a year ago.

In announcing the opening of the 2025 data collection period, Lucas posted a message warning employers of their obligations under federal civil rights law.

“You must not use the information collected and reported in your organization’s EEO-1 Component 1 report to justify treating employees differently based on their race, sex, or other protected characteristic,” she wrote.

In an interview with NPR earlier this year, Lucas explained her missive. She said a number of companies have been misusing the data — including in ways that have hurt white people and men.

Lucas believes the only people who should know the gender and race of a company’s employees are its lawyers and human resources staff. Instead, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, a number of companies published their demographic data as part of public commitments to address the lack of diversity within their ranks.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair Andrea Lucas is changing the priorities of an agency that had long focused its efforts on protecting vulnerable and underserved workers.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair Andrea Lucas has served on the commission since 2020, appointed by President Trump.

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Elizabeth Gillis/NPR

Subsequently, she contends, companies began making decisions about whom to hire, promote and interview for jobs based on sex or race, noting some even gave hiring managers financial incentives to hit diversity targets.

That use of demographic data crosses the line, she says. “All it has to do is motivate — in whole or in part — your decision making, and you’re into unlawful territory.”

Lucas declined to single out any company by name, citing the confidentiality of agency investigations. But according to court documents, the EEOC has accused Nike and The New York Times of discrimination against white employees and job applicants. The two companies are among many that published their demographic data along with their diversity-related goals for several years.

Harvard professor Sean Eddy, whose federal funding was terminated by the Trump administration last year, describes the loss as a “10-year hit to a lab.”

A focus on data in select cases

Paradoxically, Lucas has at times talked up the importance of data.

“There is no other way to protect victims of harassment and discrimination unless you collect information about them,” she said while speaking in April at a conference at Harvard organized by the Brandeis Center, an independent civil rights organization.

In that instance, she was defending the EEOC’s subpoena, requiring the University of Pennsylvania to turn over employee information that the agency doesn’t routinely collect: the names, addresses and phone numbers of Jewish employees who may have witnessed antisemitic acts on campus.

The university has, so far, refused to comply with the subpoena, noting in court filings that it echoes terrifying periods of history for Jewish communities.

“Driving a car without a dashboard”

The profound changes underway at the EEOC have kept David Cohen busy. The president of the management consulting firm DCI Consulting has fielded many calls from confused clients, wondering whether the work they’ve been doing to promote equal opportunity should continue.

For now, he’s telling clients that keeping track of their employee demographics is a smart business move, whether the government requires it or not.

Without it, he says, a company has no way of knowing if it has a problem — whether it’s recruiting from too narrow a pool, or has a bad manager somewhere, or is screening out qualified candidates for no good reason.

“It’s like you’re driving a car without a dashboard. You have no idea what’s going [on]. Am I speeding? Am I not speeding? Is my check-engine light on?” he says. “You have nothing.”

He’s been reminding clients that while priorities have shifted at the EEOC, federal civil rights laws haven’t changed.

“Stay within the law, and you will be okay,” he says.