President Donald Trump was asked on Monday about granting an expedited path to refugee status for white South Africans while not allowing refugees from countries such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trump replied in part, “Because they’re being killed. And we don’t want to see people be killed…it’s a genocide that’s taking place. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.”
The president’s comments came as a United States-funded flight carrying nearly 50 white South Africans departed Johannesburg on Sunday, marking the first group of Afrikaners granted refugee status under a new policy from Trump. The group arrived in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
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White South Africans say they’ve faced violence and economic exclusion due to their race, but their expedited relocation to the U.S. is drawing sharp criticism from humanitarian groups and South African officials.
In an announcement Monday morning, the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in South Africa said that the program was open to Afrikaners or other racial minorities in the country who could prove “a past experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.”
When asked about the reasoning for opening up the expedited pathway for the group on Monday, Trump said:
“{snip} Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.
“The newspapers and the media, television media, doesn’t even talk about it. If it were the other way round, they’d talk about it, that would be the only story they talk about. I don’t care who they are. I don’t care about their race, their color, I don’t care about their height, their weight, I don’t care about anything, I just know that what is happening is terrible.”
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South Africa’s Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation, in a press release Friday: “It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy; a country which has in fact suffered true persecution under Apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again, including through the entrenchment of rights in our Constitution, which is enforced vigorously through our judicial system.
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White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller told reporters Friday: “What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created. This is persecution based on a protected characteristic, in this case, race.”
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The post Donald Trump Explains Why He Granted White South Africans Refugee Status appeared first on American Renaissance.
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