Since President Donald Trump's return to office, the U.S. has drastically reduced the number of refugees allowed into the United States. In October 2025 the Trump administration lowered the formal annual refugee cap to a record low of 7,500 places.
With the exception of three Afghans, every refugee admitted into the U.S. between 1st October 2025 and 31st July 2026 was South African, a refugee report by the State Department revealed.
The vast majority of those South Africans admitted were white Afrikaners. Trump has claimed that the white Afrikaner minority, and white farmers in particular, have been the victim of racial persecution and "genocide" in post-apartheid South Africa.
Trump most famously made the claim during his meeting with his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa in May 2025, when he showed Ramaphosa footage of what he claimed were crosses marking the burial sites of murdered white farmers.
The crosses were indeed erected as a memorial to one murdered South African white couple, but did not themselves represent individual victims.
Trump's claims were emphatically refuted by current South African Ambassador to the U.S. Roelf Meyer in an interview with the BBC which aired on Friday.
"The notion of a mass attack on the Afrikaner was misrepresented by those that might have conveyed the message. I'm an Afrikaner from South Africa myself and I can say that I've never experienced something of that kind", Meyers told the British broadcaster.
"Their [the White House's] sources misrepresented, unfortunately, something that just doesn't exist", the diplomat continued.
The claims of white persecution in South Africa made by the Trump administration are widely disputed, both by South African government members such as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ambassador Meyers as well as human rights organizations like Amnesty International, which has accused the U.S. government of conducting a "misinformation campaign".
Violent crime is indeed a significant issue in South Africa, but it is one that affects all races, statistics show.
A policy brief released by the Institute for Security Studies revealed that "farm murders" in South Africa, which are often cited by the Trump administration as evidence of racialized violence against white South Africans, accounted for 0.2% of all murders in South Africa in the 2023-2024 financial year.
The findings also revealed that most of those homicides in South Africa were concentrated in 12% of police precincts. These areas are reportedly majority-black townships.
However, the White House has remained steadfast in its insistence that Afrikaners are facing persecution, with one White House spokesperson telling the BBC that "President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa".
According to a notice sent to Congress on Tuesday, which was obtained by CBS News, the Trump administration is expected to admit up to 17,500 more white Afrikaners as refugees to the U.S. in the coming year.
