President Trump surrounded by his preferred gradient.Tasos Katopodis/Getty
Every single one of the 599 refugees the US admitted last month was a white South African, according to data the State Department’s Bureau of Population released Friday.
In fact, so was every other refugee admitted this year. Since October 1, 2025, the US has accepted 6,668 refugees. Of those, 6,665 were white South Africans. Three—admitted last November—were from Afghanistan. No other refugees were admitted.
That data is backed up by the US Refugee Admissions Program, a federal public-private interagency collaboration program that works on refugee resettlement.
In October, the Trump administration announced that it would cut the number of refugees admitted per year to the US to 7,500—practically all of whom will be white.
A country that made its name as a haven for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the United States has long accepted refugees in numbers an order of magnitude greater—and from all over the world. The Trump figures mark a precipitous drop from from fiscal years 2022-2024; under Biden, in keeping with tradition, the annual limit was 125,000.
A presidential memo from September announced Trump’s intentions: that the refugees accepted “shall primarily be among Afrikaners from South Africa” and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”
The Trump administration sees Afrikaners, an South African ethnic group descended primarily from European settlers, as victims of white “genocide”—a racist conspiracy theory promoted by many on the far right, notably Elon Musk.
In May, the US increased the number of white South Africans it planned to admit by 10,000, to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation”—including South African immigration officials raiding a US refugee processing center in the country, arresting seven Kenyan nationals whom they alleged were working at the facility illegally.
A spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry said to the New York Times that same month 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.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote at the time, the White House “has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.”
The State Department said the estimated cost of resettling those additional 10,000 Afrikaner refugees would be $100 million.
It’s yet another way the US under Trump continues to ostentatiously demonstrate who it deems worthy of aid, and who it does not.
