Some of the first group of white South Africans granted refugee status for being deemed victims of racial discrimination under U.S. President Trump’s Refugee plan, hold U.S. flags as they attend a meet and greet event, at Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia, U.S., May 12, 2025.
Some of the white South Africans resettled in the United States under President Donald Trump’s preferential refugee programme are quietly heading back, even as his administration weighs a significant expansion of the very initiative designed to bring them over.
An internal U.S. government email reviewed by Reuters reveals that at least four Afrikaners already admitted as refugees have since returned to South Africa. One arrival in Minneapolis in late January departed less than a month after landing, after plans for his daughter and grandchildren to join him “fell through,” case notes showed. Two others who arrived in Twin Falls, Idaho, via the refugee programme reversed course a week later, citing a parent’s illness back home. A fourth, resettled in Moline, Illinois, in mid-March, returned weeks later. “Resettlement occurred quickly, she had not thoroughly thought through the process, and her family in South Africa has decided not to continue their own resettlement process,” case notes read. “Additionally, the client’s age (66) and ability to provide for herself is a concern.”
The departures cast an uncomfortable shadow over a programme Trump has championed as a humanitarian rescue mission for persecuted whites. Yet his administration is now discussing raising the annual refugee admissions ceiling from 7,500 to as high as 17,500 — an increase of 10,000 — to accommodate more South Africans of Afrikaner ethnicity, according to sources familiar with internal planning who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The White House referred questions to the State Department, whose spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied the talks. “If the president decides to raise the FY 2026 refugee admissions cap, he will do so at the appropriate time, and any numbers discussed at this point are only speculation,” the spokesperson said.
Trump set a record-low refugee ceiling of 7,500 for fiscal year 2026, which began on October 1, 2025 — a sharp reduction from the 125,000 ceiling set by former President Joe Biden. Despite that cap, the U.S. has already admitted approximately 4,500 South Africans through the first six months of the fiscal year, a pace that could soon breach existing limits. State Department figures show that virtually the entire refugee intake this fiscal year has been white South Africans; only three Afghans have been admitted alongside them.
Trump paused all refugee admissions upon taking office in January 2025, then weeks later signed an executive order prioritising the resettlement of European-descended Afrikaners, citing what he described as race-based persecution in majority-Black South Africa. Pretoria has vehemently rejected those claims. South Africa’s Black population accounts for 81 percent of the country’s 60 million people, according to 2022 census data, while Afrikaners and other white South Africans make up roughly 7 percent. The country dismantled its apartheid system — a racially segregated order that enforced separate schools, neighbourhoods, and public facilities — following its first democratic elections in 1994.
The administration is also exploring extending refugee protections beyond South Africans. Officials are considering whether religious minorities from Iran and former Soviet states could qualify under the so-called Lautenberg programme, a mechanism rooted in a 1989 budget amendment introduced by then-Senator Frank Lautenberg to ease resettlement for Jewish refugees in the United States.
The U.S. Refugee Admissions Programme was formally established in 1980 in the wake of mass displacement from wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, and was subsequently broadened to shelter persecuted people worldwide. Critics argue Trump has now effectively repurposed it as an instrument of racial and ideological preference, representing a fundamental departure from its founding ethos.
Contracting documents reported by Reuters in February indicated the U.S. was targeting the processing of 4,500 white South Africans per month, with the State Department funding the installation of more than a dozen trailers on the grounds of its embassy in Pretoria to conduct interviews. Trump has consistently portrayed South Africa as a country hostile to its white minority — yet as the returns of some resettled Afrikaners illustrate, the reality on the ground appears more complicated than the political narrative suggests.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah