Refugee admissions to the United States have all but ground to a halt — except for one group, or a “small subset,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them on Tuesday: Afrikaners. They are members of the White ethnic minority that once led South Africa’s brutal, four-decade apartheid regime, which ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as president.
The Trump administration has already welcomed the first group of Afrikaner asylum applicants, who were given expedited refugee status after claiming they were the victims of violence and discrimination in South Africa.
Other Afrikaners are waiting, keen to take advantage of the offer of special treatment from the Trump administration to gain protected status and the right to live and work in the U.S.
Those hopefuls have been meeting to share information on the process, including Dolf Grobler, who has already applied. The professional hunter told CBS News he has $2.5 million to help make America great again.
“I’m worried that the genocide, which is currently mainly focused on White farmers, is going to spread,” he said. The claim of a White genocide is one that President Trump’s adviser Elon Musk, whose family are Afrikaners, has backed.
Musk joined Mr. Trump at the White House on Wednesday as the U.S. leader hosted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa for an official visit. The Afrikaner refugee program was a topic of discussion, along with trade and other matters. In the Oval Office meeting, Ramaphosa pushed back against Mr. Trump’s repeated claims of Whites being targeted.
“Those people in many cases, are being executed, being executed, and they happen to be White, and most happen to be farmers,” Mr. Trump said, calling the situation “sort of the opposite of apartheid.”
“People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only White people. Majority of them are Black people,” Ramaphosa said.
According to South African police, in the last three months of 2024, 12 people were murdered on farms there; one was a White farmer, while the others were Black laborers or security workers. Asked if he believed life for him and his family was better under apartheid — an overtly racist minority-rule system that denied equal rights to South Africa’s vast majority Black population — Grobler didn’t hesitate.
“Yes,” he told CBS News. “I can’t say in my heart that we are better off now.” Although he did concede apartheid was wrong.
Claims of a White genocide are often circulated by right-wing groups, but the view is not held widely within the Afrikaner community.
Afrikaner commentator Piet Croucamp, an academic at North-West University in South Africa, says the claims are simply untrue.
“There’s no sign of it, never has been. In fact, Whites are economically the strongest group” in South Africa, Croucamp told CBS News. “64% of all boardrooms in South Africa are still White. The average incomes of White South Africans are vastly higher than Black South Africans … they have better schools, they have better education, private health care. This is the land of milk and honey if you’re White.”
Croucamp suspects the South African government’s strong stance against Israel’s actions in Gaza, and its relations with China, could have played some part in Mr. Trump’s decision to embrace the controversial amnesty program for Afrikaners, but he believes there’s more to it.
“In South Africa, right-wing groups, so-called civil society groups, we know that they have access to the Trump administration because they claim that. And just over the last few days, they have, several times, they said that they will speak to the American government, as if they have access to them. And if you listen to what Trump has said, it corresponds exactly with the genocide narrative that they sell and that they market,” Croucamp said. “So, I’m afraid I have to believe them when they say they have direct access to the Trump administration, and we see what Trump has been doing.”
Grilled about the refugee program Tuesday on Capitol Hill, in a testy exchange with Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Secretary of State Rubio insisted that U.S. foreign policy “doesn’t require even-handedness, it involves prioritizing the interests of the United States. … The United States has a right to pick and choose who they allow into the United States.”
White South Africans make up only about 7% of the country’s population, but they still own more than half of all its farmland. And while the country has a staggeringly high crime rate, racial motives are not generally a factor, according to Afrikaner cattle farmer Nick Serfontein.
He acknowledged that violent attacks on farmers do occur, especially in agricultural land near big cities, where there are often large, impoverished populations, but he said overall, “I feel safe. I sleep with my doors open here on the farm.”
There have also been allegations that White farmers are the victims of land expropriation, with the government seizing farms without providing compensation. In January, Ramaphosa signed into law measures to expropriate mostly unused land for public use, which his government said was necessary to address the consequences of decades of apartheid. While the law provides for fair compensation in most cases, it also allows for expropriation without compensation under limited circumstances. And any measures can be challenged in court.
Mr. Trump has argued that it unfairly targets White landowners, though the law does not mention the race of anyone who could be affected under the legislation.
And more importantly, there hasn’t been a single case of expropriation without compensation documented in the 31 years since apartheid ended.
Serfontein argues the problem isn’t a deliberate effort by the government to seize White-owned land without compensation, but rather “because of a dysfunctional government. The model is wrong.”
He said that for decades, land has been handed over to a Black population with compensation for former owners under established rules, but without any support for the new owners. So, almost a decade ago, Serfontein helped to launch a project aimed at training new Black farmers to work the land.
To date, he says he’s personally helped train more than 700 young Black farmers — the country’s next generation of agricultural workers.
“I’m extremely positive, and so are the young people, the young farmers, they are positive,” he said.
As for a white genocide, he agreed with Croucamp, saying bluntly: “It’s not happening.”
Serfontein said he didn’t know the histories of the Afrikaners who had already left for the U.S., and he didn’t doubt they “probably had some unhappy experiences in South Africa, about a number of things. But let me tell you that if you went to NAMPO last week — NAMPO is the biggest agricultural show in the Southern Hemisphere — you would have found a vibe there between the farmers, young farmers, old farmers, Black farmers, White farmers, that you’ve never experienced before. They are so excited about the future of South Africa.”
They want to farm in a country, Serfontein says, where most people understand that the land must be shared by both Black and White.