Donald Trump’s administration has announced a plan to admit 10,000 more white South African refugees into the U.S. than the government had previously planned.
The State Department told Congress on Monday that it would increase refugee admissions from 7,500 to 17,500 amid the president’s claims that white Afrikaners are experiencing “white genocide” in South Africa.
The emergency notice to Congress said that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation,” which has resulted in the Trump administration increasing its refugee admissions ceiling for white South Africans for fiscal year 2026, the Associated Press reported.
Last October, the Trump administration drastically cut the total number of refugees it would allow into the U.S. from the 125,000 cap set by President Joe Biden to just 7,500.
These refugees would almost all be Afrikaners—white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch and French settlers. Last month, it was reported that all but three of the nearly 4,500 refugees who had entered the U.S. since October 2025 were Afrikaners.
The Trump administration will now allow 10,000 more refugees to enter the U.S. while claiming the South African government has “sought to undermine the U.S. resettlement program and attacked Afrikaners.”
The government also cited a South African raid on a U.S. refugee processing center in December 2025, which it denounced at the time as “unacceptable.”
“This escalating hostility heightens the risks to Afrikaners in South Africa, who are already subject to far-reaching government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” the State Department said in the notice.
Trump has repeatedly pushed a number of claims disputed by South Africa during his second term, including unsubstantiated allegations that white farmers are being subjected to “genocide.”
“Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. But whether they’re white or Black makes no difference to me,” Trump said in May 2025. “But white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa, and the newspapers and the media, television media, doesn’t even talk about it.”
Later that month, a bizarre scene played out in the Oval Office, where Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to show him videos backing discredited claims of a white genocide in the country.
In a March 2026 interview with The New York Times, Ramaphosa called Trump’s Afrikaner refugee policy “racist” and said his views on the lives of white people in South Africa are “truly uninformed.”
