The Trump administration plans to admit up to 17,500 refugees in fiscal year 2027, with the overwhelming majority of those openings reserved for white Afrikaners from South Africa — a dramatic reshaping of a U.S. refugee program that for decades brought people fleeing persecution and war from countries around the world.
The State Department told Congress this week that the 17,500-person ceiling will go “primarily” to Afrikaners. The administration expects to spend about $500 million resettling those admitted. It said Afrikaners face racial discrimination, violence and the possible seizure of property in South Africa, and said they are expected to “fully assimilate” into American society while minimizing costs to U.S. taxpayers.
That is a major departure from how the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, created under the Refugee Act of 1980, has traditionally operated. Refugees are generally people outside the United States who have been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Presidents set an annual admission ceiling after consulting Congress.
Historically, those slots have been distributed among regions of the world. In fiscal year 2023, for example, the largest groups came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Afghanistan and Burma, while refugees also arrived from Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Ukraine, Iraq and dozens of other countries. The Biden administration later set a ceiling of 125,000.
Trump suspended the broader refugee program after returning to office in January 2025, saying the United States needed to limit admissions to refugees who could “fully and appropriately assimilate.” He subsequently created an exception for Afrikaners. Through August of this year, all but three of nearly 3,000 refugees admitted were South Africans, according to State Department data cited by Reuters.
The South African government rejects the administration’s claim that Afrikaners face systemic racial persecution. So do prominent Afrikaner groups. Trade union Solidariteit said it knows of no “emergency refugee situation,” while AfriForum, which represents more than 300,000 Afrikaners, said it has no information supporting such a claim. Both say Afrikaners should build their futures in South Africa.
The dispute also unfolds against South Africa’s racial history. Afrikaners were central to the apartheid system that governed the country from 1948 until 1994, when a white-minority government enforced racial segregation and denied Black South Africans fundamental political rights.
Meanwhile, people fleeing documented dangers elsewhere have largely lost access to the U.S. refugee pipeline. Iran, for example, historically sent refugees to the United States, and U.N. human-rights experts reported widespread alleged arbitrary arrests, disappearances and torture connected to anti-government protests there in 2026.
The contrast is particularly striking with Haiti. Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, allows people already in the United States to remain when conditions in their homeland make returning unsafe. The Trump administration has moved to end that protection for Haitians even as widespread gang violence has displaced nearly 1.5 million people.
At the same time, the administration plans to spend about $500 million resettling mostly white South Africans, arguing that Afrikaners face racial persecution. South Africa disputes that claim, saying Afrikaners face the same broader violent-crime problem affecting other South Africans. The result: Haitians are being sent back to a country engulfed in widespread violence while Afrikaners are being brought to the United States through a refugee program largely closed to people elsewhere.
