President Donald Trump seeks to fundamentally alter how the United States approaches immigration. Less than a month into office, the White House has effectively shut the border to asylum-seekers—including by cancelling CBPOne appointments for migrants who were supposed to present themselves at ports of entry on Inauguration Day. The Trump administration has announced an end to Temporary Protected Status and parole programs for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Central American, and Caribbean migrants, and shuttered the refugee program.
After promising throughout his campaign to run the biggest deportation machine in U.S. history, the Trump regime has also flown Venezuelan migrants to Guantánamo Bay. (His administration alleges those flown to Gitmo are members of the Tren de Aragua organized crime syndicate, but the family of at least one of the imprisoned Venezuelans has publicly contested this.)
South Africa-born oligarch and presidential consigliere Elon Musk has also posted on X suggesting that DOGE will cancel scheduled federal government payments to a Lutheran nonprofit that aids migrants. Although the door to the United States is mostly shut, the president did open it to one new group: Last week, Trump signed an executive order instructing his government to prioritize the resettlement of “Afrikaner refugees”—white, European-descended citizens of South Africa.
