Nelson Mandela’s great-grandson ripped President Donald Trump for rolling out the welcome mat for white Afrikaners while booting other refugees from the U.S. en masse.
“If Trump is honest, he should deport those people because they don’t qualify to be refugees in the United States of America,” Mayibuye Melisizwe Mandela told Newsweek. “Once they land here in South Africa, we must arrest them.”
President Donald Trump has welcomed more than 60 white Afrikaners into the United States as refugees on the heels that they are “fleeing South Africa” to escape a “genocide,” Newsweek reported.
Trump’s comments stirred a response from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who went to the White House on May 21 in an appearance that debunked Trump’s false claims, The New York Times reported.
Despite this, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller doubled down on false claims of a “genocide,” saying that the white Afrikaners fit the “textbook definition of why the refugee program was created. This is race-based persecution.”
According to Mayibuye, the groups should be in prison for “treason” and “spreading misinformation and incitement against South Africa.” He opened a criminal case against the group on June 12, accusing them of “treason, according to an affidavit viewed by Newsweek.
“I believe they should face prison,” Mayibuye told Newsweek. “White genocide is a very serious allegation and in South Africa we know that there is no white genocide. It’s a country where there is crime, like every other country.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
A spokesperson for a group that supports “disenfranchised South Africans seeking a new future in the United States” told Newsweek on May 30 that the resettlement program for white Afrikaners “is being scaled and the numbers will increase radically within the next three months.”
The news comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation campaign against what Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called “worst of the worst” in an interview with Fox News earlier this month.
However, NBC News reported that only around 11% of the “criminal illegal aliens” detained by ICE had been convicted of either violent or property crimes.
