Report: Diplomats told Trump backed program was ‘intended for white people’ only

A Friday report from Reutersclaims that a senior Trump administration official recently informed diplomats in South Africa that a refugee program set up by U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this year was explicitly intended for white people.

According to Reuters, American diplomats in South Africa earlier this month asked the U.S. State Department whether it was allowed to process refugee claims from South African citizens who spoke the Afrikaans language but who were of mixed-race descent.

The diplomats received a response from Spencer Chretien, the senior bureau official in the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, who informed them that "the program is intended for white people," writes Reuters.

The State Department told Reuters that the scope of the program is actually broader than what was outlined in Chretien's message and that its policy is "to consider both Afrikaners and other racial minorities for resettlement," which lines up with guidance posted earlier this year stating that applicants for refugee status under the program "must be of Afrikaner ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in South Africa."

Trump back in February issued an executive order establishing a refugee program for what the order described as "Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination." The president also lobbed baseless accusations at South African President Cyril Ramaphosa this past May that his government was engaging in "genocide" against white farmers in his country.

The notion that whites in South Africa face severe racial discrimination, let alone the threat of genocide, is difficult to square with the reality that white South Africans own three-quarters of the private land in the nation despite being a mere 7% of the population.

Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council, reacting to the Reuters report, explained on social media platform Bluesky the reasons that Trump's refugee program for Afrikaners is highly unusual. Lind pointed to the fact that the United States government at the moment is still trying to block refugees who have already gone through a two-year vetting process from entering the country, whereas it let many Afrikaner refugees into the country after a mere two weeks of vetting.

"Two years of vetting is insufficient, but two weeks is enough to know if someone will 'be assimilated easily'—as admin officials said when the Afrikaners came," she observed.