Trump Protects White South Africans, Ignores Plights of Thousands of Black Africans Under Threat Of Deportation
More than 40,000 immigrants face deportation after having fled to the U.S. from the war torn, African nation of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Calls for temporary protections for the DRC immigrants have been repeatedly rejected by trump and past administrations despite desperate conditions in a nation rife with murder, rape, hunger and displacement.
Trump has ignored the DRC but this week he welcomed to the U.S. a group of white South Africans who claim the government is attempting to seize their land. Trump said he is providing safe haven to white Afrikaners who say they are victims of racism and the South African government’s attempts at genocide through new laws that attempt to alter the historic, drastic imbalance of white owned property.
“Farmers are being killed,” the president said, without offering evidence, at a news conference. “White farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
And while the white South African entourage gets a hero’s welcome, trump has discontinued protections for hundreds of thousands of people who have fled violence in countries like Haiti, Venezuela and Afghanistan, populated largely by people of color.
Temporary Protected Status
A total of 1.1 million refugees are currently in the U.S. and are protected from deportation under the temporary protected status or TPS program. They include people who have fled from such countries as Burma (also known as Myanmar), Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen, though only migrants who meet specific parameters are eligible.
But many more immigrants do not have TPS protections, including 100,034 refugees who arrived in the U.S. from Oct. 1, 2023, through Sept. 30, 2024, according to the US State Department, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
Almost half of the refugees arriving last year, 40,300 people, fled from their DRC homeland. They are spread throughout the U.S. with Pennsylvania the state with the highest number of DRC immigrants at 930. Afghanistan had the next highest number of immigrants, 23,894; while 18,200 people fled to the U.S. from Venezuela. None of them have TPS status and could soon be deported.
The government can grant TPS to nationals of designated countries who are experiencing ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or any temporary or extraordinary conditions that would prevent the foreign national from returning safely and assimilating into their duty. When the status comes up for expiration, the Attorney General may reinstitute TPS.
More than 7 million people have been displaced because of armed conflicts, flooding, and instability in the DRC. The State Department reported significant human rights issues including arbitrary and extrajudicial killings; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary detention and more.
Lawmakers, including Rep. Yvette Clarke. D-N.Y., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.Y., urged the Biden administration to designate TPS for the DRC but no action was taken. Trump also has failed to press for TPS for the DRC.
Trump tried unsuccessfully in his first term to end the temporary protected status program. In his first week in office after being reelected, Trump suspended all refugee admissions to the U.S. and slashed funding for resettlement groups that help refugees find jobs and housing across the country.
While trump has come to the rescue of white South Africans, the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced the termination of TPS for people fleeing the violence in Afghanistan.
“This administration is returning TPS to its original temporary intent,” said Noem. “We’ve reviewed the conditions in Afghanistan with our interagency partners, and they do not meet the requirements for a TPS designation. Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country.”
Previously Noem terminated TPS for immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sudan, Haiti, Honduras, and Nepal.
The Global Peace Index (GPI) rated Afghanistan the fourth most dangerous country in the world, after having been the most dangerous one for six years in a row. As a war-torn country that has been mired in war, revolution, and civil strife for decades, Afghanistan experienced a significant decrease in conflict-related deaths in 2022, with the number falling by 90.6 percent, from almost 43,000 to just over 4,000.
“It is still the least peaceful country in South Asia that saw a deterioration in peacefulness on the 2024 GPI due to increases in military size and slight declines in safety indicators,” according to the report by the GPI.
Noem also revoked TPS extensions granted under the Biden era for 600,000 Venezuelans. Crime in Venezuela is widespread and violent, with high rates of murder and kidnapping. The country has been noted for its extremely high crime index, ranking as one of the most violent in Latin America, largely attributed to a poor political and economic environment. In urban areas like Caracas, violent crime is particularly prevalent, and foreigners are often targeted. As of 2023, Venezuela has a crime index of 83.76, the highest in the world.
In February, Noem further withheld deportation protections and work permits for 521,000 Haitians. Haitian protections were removed despite State Department warnings against travel to Haiti because of “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited healthcare.”
‘Persecuted” Afrikaners
This week, trump welcomed a group of white South Africans after the U.S. granted them refugee status based on phony claims of persecution by the black government. They claim “persecution” under a new law for land redistribution. Currently, 73 percent of South Africa’s usable farmland is still owned by the White minority, only 7 percent of the population.
The new expropriation law allows the government to seize some land under very particular circumstances that was stolen from black South Africans during the years of apartheid which began in 1948 and ended in 1990. The expropriation law was enacted by the South African government to begin to address longstanding complaints over the most glaring vestige of apartheid, unequal ownership of the land. The new law details the steps for the government to take control of private land.
It includes a section called “nil compensation,” when land can be seized without payment because it has been abandoned or is not being used. In such cases, the government must prove it has a broader public use for the land. The law includes multiple safeguards for landowners, including their right to take the matter to the courts. The law is similar to U.S. law which allows the government to take land needed for public use under the law of eminent domain.
No land seizures have been carried out under the South African law.
A statement from the South African government denied any widespread persecution of whites.
“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy; a country which has in fact suffered true persecution under Apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again, including through the entrenchment of rights in our Constitution, which is enforced vigorously through our judicial system,” the statement said.
As modest as the bill was, it caught the attention of trump, and his close advisor, multi-billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and benefited under the apartheid laws. Musk harbors serious resentment toward South African officials. Musk wants to expand his huge, Starlink satellite company to South Africa but he is angry because has been delayed after he refused to abide by South African law which requires Starlink to have at least 30 percent Black ownership. Musk called the law “openly racist.”
Musk also claimed in 2023 that South African political leaders “are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa.” And on May 12, trump told reporters he’d chosen to allow Afrikaners to seek asylum in the U.S. because of the “genocide that’s taking place” in South Africa
Trump blasted the expropriation law as a “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights” and responded with an executive order halting all U.S. foreign assistance to South Africa. He said White Afrikaners were “victims of unjust racial discrimination” and ordered the secretaries of state and homeland security to give them priority for refugee resettlement in the United States.
The president also accused South Africa of undermining U.S. foreign policy by building closer ties with Iran and taking Israel to the International Court of Justice for allegedly promoting genocide in its conduct of the war in Gaza.
Trump said the executive order will open the door for “the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
Trump claimed in @realDonaldTrump that “South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country. They are confiscating their LAND and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding. To go a step further, any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!”
Joining with trump in the unfounded accusations against South Africa is Stephen Miller, the last person on the planet with any standing to whine about racism. Miller is the White House deputy chief of staff and chief racist and the driver behind trump’s most demonic plans to rid the nation of migrants of color.
“What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,” Miller said. “This is persecution based on a particular characteristic, in this case, race. So this is race-based persecution.”
Legacy of Apartheid
Trump and Miller bloviated about the “race-based persecution” in South Africa but neither mentioned the ruthless apartheid system which was the law between 1960 and 1983, as more than 3.5 million nonwhite South Africans were removed from their homes and forcibly relocated into racially segregated, impoverished neighborhoods.
Before apartheid was dismantled, the U.S. and many other European nations generally supported the white South African government. Since the fall of apartheid, the U.S. has had generally friendly ties with South Africa.
The ties were strained after trump was highly critical of a suit filed by the South African government in the International Court of Justice in late 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s ongoing attacks began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Cold War and opposition to communism united the U.S. and the South African government before apartheid ended. The United States and other Western countries opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
Trump And Racism
The roots of trump’s racism run deep, from his early years when he helped his father to avoid housing discrimination laws in the family’s housing empire to the president’s latest executive order granting refugee status to a group of white South Africans who have claimed persecution by the majority black government.
Trump first publicly expressed his racism in 1989 when he placed full page ads in various newspapers calling for reinstatement of the death penalty so the “Central Park Five” could be executed for their crimes. The five young African American men were charged with a brutal rape in Central Park but all were eventually absolved of any guilt.
Then at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference trump first brought up the racist “birther theory” that claimed President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen and could not be president. Trump demanded that Obama release his birth certificate which he eventually did release, proving he was a U.S. citizen. Despite the proof, trump and others have continued spreading the false “birther theory.”
Fast forward to 2017, and the white supremacist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., when trump referred to “very fine people on both sides,” including the neo-Nazis and racists and counter-demonstrators. One counter-demonstrator was killed when a white supremacist rammed his car into the crowd of demonstrators.
Two years later, in 2019, during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador and unidentified African nations as “shithole countries.” And then there is his obvious support of the unsubstantiated, far right conspiracy known as the “replacement theory” which claims that Democrats are welcoming people of color so as to tip the scale for a majority anti-white population.
These are only the highlights and don’t come close to expressing the breath of trump’s compassion for white superiority.