Today nearly 60 white South Africans were admitted into the United States.

It’s part of President Donald trump’s resettlement program for white Africans, largely descendants of Dutch and French colonial settlers in South Africa. Afrikaners also led the racist apartheid government there until it ended in 1994. Today, the White House alleges that a new South African law which redistributes unused land to the state is racist and that the white minority is being persecuted by the blacked government. President Trump even halted all aid to South Africa back in February. Applications from these white families were fasttrack by the administration even as it suspended the US refugee resettlement program, leaving thousands of approved refugees worldwide stranded. Joining US now is Bill Fraylik, the head of the Refugee and Migrants Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Bill. Welcome to the Safeerupdates. Good to be here. So President Trump was asked about the classification of these families as refugees, here’s what he had to say about conditions in South Africa.
It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about, but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place and.
Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white, but whether they white or black makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being.
Brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa, white farmers being brutally killed, their land being confiscated. What do you make of these allegations of white genocide? As the President has said, as we know Elon Musk has said before and the classification of these families as refugees, well, this is not factually supported from any of the information that we’ve seen. The expropriation law that you mentioned only came into effect in January, and it is stated that it is for non-compensation for private land that would go into public hands if that land has been unused if there’s nobody living and working on that land or developing it. And so far, of course, none of that land has actually been taken.
So there have been homicide rates that are high rates in South Africa. I think it was like 13 thousand in 2023, but only single digits were farmers that were killed now. You don’t want anyone to be killed and I don’t want to disparage any one person’s story. But we don’t have the phenomenon of people fleeing the country as we do with refugees all over the world, about 38 million refugees in the world who by definition are people who have crossed an international border because they’re fleeing persecution, theyre fleeing war, theyre fleeing conflict and there are no Africa or refugee camps. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees didn’t refer any South Africans of any background of any race of any language for Reese in the last year, so this is something really new and different from anything we’ve seen and the families who arrived today were approved in a few months time. We understand they have flown over on a State Department chartered flight is that the usual process for refugee resettlement? No. I mean one. You often have refugees that have spent years and years in refugee camps. And then out of the millions of refugees in the world, less than one percent are ever even referred for third country resettlement.
They have exhaustive vetting, security screening, health screening.
Screening to make sure that they actually do have a wealth and fear of being persecuted and they usually are people that have great difficulties in the country of first asylum. There are people that have difficulties in the refugee camps in which they’re living. Maybe they’re being persecuted in the country of first arrival as well. So these are circumstances that you would assess on a case-by-case basis and that takes a long period of time to do. This was done in three months and these are people that came directly from their country of origin. They were not people that were.
Living in refugee camps. They were not people that were vetted by the UN refugee agency or revered to the United States in the normal way, and they were flown here in chartered planes paid for directly by the US. Usually it’s the International Organization for Migration that does travel loans that refugees are expected to pay back. Actually, upon arrival, as we speak, we know the Trump administration has ended deportation protections for a number of countries, people from Afgnistan. Haiti. Sudan. The Refugee Resettle Program, as we noted, has been halted. It’s very difficult to ignore the racial dynamics here. White South Africans have been allowed in, while people from majority black and brown countries have been kept out. What do you see when you look at these policies? Clearly there’s a racial twist here when you see again going in the first Trump administration, where he described Haitians as coming from four lettertter word.
Countries that he said he wanted people that looked like Norwegians to come to the United States. And in 2018, long before the Russians had invaded Ukraine.
Under the first Trump administration, the group that he chose to increase the refugee numbers were Ukrainians, while there was a dramatic decrease slashing of refugee numbers in Africa, in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. And so now we’ve seen a complete closing of the door, a total suspension of the refugee resettlement program for all refugees everywhere. And then 18 days later, another executive order that privileges only white South Africans.
Bill Freylik from Human Rights Watchtch. Thank you for being here. Appreciate your time. Thank you for having me.