The Trump administration on Thursday announced it would set the lowest refugee admissions cap in U.S. history, allocating just 7,500 spots for this fiscal year, mostly for Afrikaners who it has claimed are facing racial discrimination in South Africa for being White.
The previous lowest refugee ceiling was set by the first Trump administration in 2020, when it allocated 15,000 spots for fiscal year 2021.
The announcement Thursday is the latest effort by Mr. Trump and his top aides to dramatically scale back the decades-old U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, a humanitarian policy for vulnerable people fleeing war and violence across the world that once enjoyed robust bipartisan support.
Mr. Trump suspended the U.S. refugee program hours after taking office for a second time earlier this year, citing strains on American communities receiving the refugees and concerns about the vetting process. Weeks later, his administration made an exemption for Afrikaners, calling them victims of racial oppression.
In an order posted on the federal government’s journal of regulations, Mr. Trump said the 7,500 refugee spots for fiscal year 2026 would “primarily be allocated among Afrikaners” and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.” Fiscal year 2026 started on Oct. 1 and culminates at the end of September 2026.
The South African government has vehemently denied Afrikaners and other White South Africans are being persecuted. Before the 1990s, White South Africans enforced a brutal system of apartheid over the country’s Black majority.
Afrikaners are an ethnic group in South Africa made up of descendants of European settlers and colonists, mostly from the Netherlands, who first arrived there in the 1600s. The Trump administration welcomed the first group of Afrikaners granted refugee status in May.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP
The prioritization of Afrikaners — while refugees from places like Afghanistan, Myanmar and Sudan plagued by ethnic violence and armed conflict are being blocked from entering the U.S. — has led to accusations of preferential treatment among refugee advocates.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, one of several national groups that traditionally have worked with the U.S. government to resettle refugees, said Mr. Trump’s decision “lowers our moral standing.”
“At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the program’s purpose as well as its credibility,” she added.
Officially created in 1980, the U.S. refugee program was designed to offer a safe harbor to people abroad fleeing persecution because of their race, religion, political views or membership in a social group.
Before the second Trump administration took office, refugees were typically referred to the U.S. by United Nations officials and spent months or years in third-party countries undergoing interviews, as well as security and medical checks, before being granted entry into the U.S. The process is distinct from the asylum system, which can be accessed by foreigners already on American soil, including those who enter the U.S. illegally.
Over the past decades, most of those admitted into the U.S. as refugees have come from countries in Africa and Asia plagued by war, ethnic strife or repression of minority groups, State Department figures show.
After refugee admissions plummeted to a record low of 11,000 in fiscal year 2021 — mostly due to Trump-era cuts and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic — the Biden administration dramatically expanded the program.
In fiscal year 2024, the Biden administration welcomed more than 100,000 refugees, the highest level since the 1990s, according to government data. Officials stopped publishing refugee admissions data after Mr. Trump returned to the White House.