New data from the US Refugee Processing Centre reveals a dramatic reshaping of American refugee admissions under the Trump administration, with nearly all resettled arrivals since October originating from a single country: South Africa.
Between October 2025 and April 2026, the United States admitted 4,499 refugees. Of those, all but three individuals from Afghanistan were South African nationals. The figures mark a stark departure from the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration (October 2023–September 2024), when 125,000 refugees from 85 countries were accepted.
President Donald Trump’s overhaul, which previously halted all refugee admissions—including those from active war zones—created a specific exemption for a white minority group: Afrikaners. The administration has repeatedly characterized Afrikaners as a persecuted community, a claim that the South African government has formally rejected.
In announcing the policy shift, the White House stated that priority would be given to “Afrikaner South Africans and other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands,” framing the move as a measure to strengthen national security and public safety.
The policy has sharply escalated diplomatic tensions between Washington and Pretoria. In May 2025, South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool was expelled from the US after accusing President Trump of “mobilising a supremacism” and attempting to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle.” Later that month, during an Oval Office meeting, Trump directly confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, claiming that white farmers in South Africa were targets of “genocide.”
Ramaphosa rejected the assertion, receiving support from John Steenhuisen, the white leader of the Democratic Alliance, a key party in South Africa’s coalition government. “Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work,” Steenhuisen told Trump.
In October 2025, Pretoria formally criticized the US priority for Afrikaner refugees, stating that allegations of a “white genocide” had been “widely discredited” and lacked reliable evidence. The South African government also highlighted an open letter from prominent Afrikaner academics, business leaders, and descendants of apartheid-era figures who rejected the narrative, with some signatories labeling the relocation scheme “racist.”
The first group of 68 South African refugees arrived in the US in May 2025. Admissions remained modest until early 2026, when 2,848 individuals arrived across February and March alone. The new arrivals have been resettled nationwide, with the largest concentration—543 people—now living in Texas.
