FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators hold placards in support of U.S. President Donald Trump's stance against what he calls racist laws, land expropriation, and farm attacks, outside the American Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, February 15, 2025. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko/File Photo/File Photo
An immigration law expert is suspicious of President Donald Trump's reported new efforts to resettle white South Africans into the United States.
Trump signed a controversial executive order in February extending refugee status to Afrikaners, a move long desired by white supremacists and that appears to have been a pet issue of Trump's longtime ally and South African immigrant Elon Musk, who has said that country's government has enacted racist policies against the group responsible for Apartheid.
But a new report by The Lever suggests these efforts could be taking a dramatic new step, even as the Trump administration has essentially shut down the refugee resettlement program for everyone else.
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"The first group of Dutch-descended Afrikaners is scheduled to arrive in the United States imminently, and they will be receiving emergency support from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the memo, which was signed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and Office of Refugee Resettlement assistant secretary Andrew Gradison," reported Katya Schwenk.
American Immigration Council attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, however, expressed doubts about this whole thing in a post on X.
"I am skeptical," he wrote. "I don't see how this is legally or even physically possible; the refugee resettlement organizations which are necessary to complete this process have been iced out completely and people would need to be screened by Refugee Officers before they could come."
Trump's executive order back in February raised eyebrows because it focused not just on South Africa's new land expropriation policy, but on "violent attacks" on white farmers, which echoes longstanding white nationalist conspiracy theories pushed by Tucker Carlson and others on the far right that there is a plot to ethnically cleanse white people from the nation.