Why Are White South African Farmers Being Granted Special Status By Trump?

“Never has there been a special program for Africans to come in as refugees to the United States." -- Senator Tim Kaine

On May 20, 2025, during a Homeland Security hearing, Senator Tim Kaine asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio several challenging questions, which Rubio was unable to adequately address.

Kaine begins by pointing out that the Trump administration issued an executive order (”Realigning the United States Refugee Program”) essentially pausing American acceptance of refugees. Yet, as Kaine points out, one exception has been made: white South African farmers, many of whom are referred to as Afrikaners.

Kaine asks, “Do you think they’re more persecuted than Uyghurs or Rohingyas or more persecuted than political dissidents in Cuba or Venezuela or Nicaragua, more persecuted than those who would be threatened should they be returned to Afghanistan by violence by the Taliban?”

Rubio could not say that they were, instead attempting to justify this exception by mentioning that the Afrikaners were “a small subset” who are easy to get and who live in fear for their lives and their farmland.

President Trump has been even more blunt in his assessment of the plight of white farmers in South Africa. During a press conference on May 12, Trump said, “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’re white or Black, it makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

To Trump’s point, there are recordings of party leaders, who, while thankfully in the minority, can nonetheless lead large crowds into chanting “Kill the Boer!!,” which can be — though not necessarily -- interpreted to mean “Kill the Afrikaner. "

These videos are chilling. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, tweeted one such video, describing it as, “A whole arena chanting about killing white people.” Trump played one such video during his meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphos. Imagine how frightening these videos must be to the Afrikaners.

However, to answer Kaine’s question directly about whether the Afrikaners are more persecuted than the Uyghurs and other groups; no, they are not.

While it’s true that South Africa is one of the most violent countries in the world, the primary victims of these homicides in South Africa, much like in the United States, are Black. According to The Spectator, “Overwhelmingly, murder victims are young black men killed by other young black men. Whites make up around eight per cent of the population and are the victims in roughly two per cent of murders.”

And while Trump specifically mentions that white farmers are being “brutally killed,” of the over 19,000 South African murder victims between April and December 2024, only seven were farmers. How many of those seven are white is unclear.

By contrast, while Afrikaners are being frightened by horrific speeches in packed arenas, Blacks in Nigeria are being massacred for simply being Christian. For example, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) reported that 56 such Christians were murdered on April 13, 2025. According to a CSI Nigeria project manager, “The majority of the victims had been hacked on the back of their necks with machetes.” Yet no expedited refugee status has been offered to these Christians.

To another point, on February 5, 2025, Rubio tweeted that he would not attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, in part because, “South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property.” Musk’s aforementioned tweet also complained that “the South African government passed a law legalizing taking property from white people at will with no payment.” Trump has expressed outrage over this expropriation as well.

They are referencing South Africa’s controversial Expropriation Act, 2024, which, “gives the state the power to expropriate some privately owned land without compensation for owners,” but, according to South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, “provides for compensation to be paid in the vast majority of cases.”

Much like Special Field Order 15, General Sherman’s 1865 “40 acres and a mule” military order that sought to redistribute land taken without compensation from former slaveholders to freed slaves, the Expropriation Act, 2024 will purportedly seek to redistribute land from the Afrikaners who largely earned their land and wealth through the exploitation of South African Blacks.

Through apartheid, the white minority, which had initially enslaved Blacks, then forced them to work in mines for gold and diamonds, continued to trap Blacks into an economically inferior position. Apartheid prevented Blacks from voting, restricted education and entrepreneurism, and limited their ability to own private property. To use Rubio’s word, apartheid also ‘expropriated’ the land of many Blacks and gave that land to whites, often without compensation to the rightful owners.

Furthermore, one wonders if the white South African farmers who were granted an EZ pass into the United States are the sort we, as Americans, should want inside our borders. One of the complaints many express with immigration, especially here and throughout the West, is that the foreign-born sometimes fail to integrate into the culture of their new nation. One hears, for example, about migrants from Africa who now live in, say, Italy, but don’t speak Italian, are not Catholic, and, most shockingly of all, don’t eat pasta. And speaking of the fear of foreigners not integrating, and of eating, who can forget Trump accusing the Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating pets?

Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1990, 35 years ago. That’s more recent by nearly three decades than the birth of an average member of Congress. Even a few of the wives and mistresses of these congressmen can remember the fall of apartheid. Are we to believe the white South Africans have not been affected by the evil, racist apartheid culture that they've all benefited from and some have lived under during their early adulthoods?

As Kaine mentioned, “Never has there been a special program for Africans to come in as refugees to the United States. We’ve allowed special programs for people being persecuted for their religion, Soviet era Jews. We’ve allowed special programs for people fleeing from communism, Cuba, Vietnam, [and] the Soviet Union. We’ve never allowed a special program to allow Africans into the United States in an expedited refugee status until now.”

And the beneficiaries of this expedited refugee status are not the victims of centuries of racial repression, but rather the perpetrators of it.

—DK