President Trump signed an executive order in February that established the refugee status for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority in South Africa that created and directed the racial segregation system known as Apartheid.
As part of the Executive Order, the Trump administration created an accelerated path so that Afrikaners were reassed in the United States, even when the administration has banned most of the refugees in the countries affected by war and famine.
While waiting at Johannesburg airport, passengers said the United States embassy had instructed them not to talk to the media. The first Afrikaners group arrived in the United States on May 12.
Who are Afrikaners?
The Afrikaners who arrived in the United States on Monday are the descendants of the European colonizers who arrived in South Africa approximately four centuries ago. Later they created the Apartheid system in 1948.
Decades after the end of apartheid, some Afrikaners now say that work is denied and have been attacked by violence due to their race.
“No white person in their right mind would stay in this country,” said Jaco Van Der Merwe, 52, an Afrikaner who lives in Johannesburg. “I think South Africa is over.”
Forty -nine Afrikaners, including parents and children, boarded a flight in Johannesburg to the United States on Sunday night, according to a spokesman for the Authority of the Airport of South Africa.
The United States Department of State said in March that he had received 8,000 consultations from people looking for information on the refugee program. It is not clear if the United States government will admit more families.
Organizations such as America have established to help “support South Africans deprived of their rights that seek a new future in the United States.” Some leading Afrikaner activists say they would prefer Mr. Trump to help his cause at home instead of a sofas refugee status in the United States.
What does the earth have to do with that?
Much of the discontent between Afrikaners focuses on their experience in rural communities and frustration on land ownership.
Many Afrikaners grow to make a living. Apartheid duration, the government denied black South Africans the right to possess main agricultural land. That meean that almost all large -scale commercial farms in the country were white -owned companies. This is still true today.
Althegh, White South Africans represent only 7 percent of the population, have cultivation lands that cover approximately half of the country. The South African government has tried to address this inequality with several agrarian reform programs, including the recent expropriation law, which allows the government to acquire private property lands in the public in the public that provides compensation to the owner.
When Trump signed the Executive Order announcing his plans to reassure the “Afrikaner refugees,” he said it was because the South African government had created a system that “disadvantaged racial land owners.”
Why are Afrikaners awarded refugee status?
Refugees can often wait years before being prosecuted and approved to travel to the United States. The Afrikaners who arrived on Monday had to wait no more than three months.
The president has equated the efforts of the South African government to undo racial inequalities with anti-Blanca discrimination. He said Monday that Afrikaners were victims of a “genocide.”
“Farmers are being killed,” he told reporters. “It turns out that they are white. If they are white or black, it does not differentiate me. White farmers are being brutally killed and the earth is confiscated in South Africa.”
Police data do not support that narrative, which demonstrates that the murders on the farms are rare and that the victims are mostly black.
South African officials have described administration movements as politically motivated. Trump has criticized the South African government for its ties with Iran and for presenting a case of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice on the War in Gaza.
“It is very unfortunate that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the appearance of being” refugees “is completely motivated and designed to question the constitutional democracy of South Africa, South Gversman, a statement from the South Government.
How will they be resettle in the United States?
Trump said on Monday that the United States would grant citizenship to Afrikaners.
The Administration plans to trust a refugee office in the Department of Health and Human Services to help with resettlement. The office has communicated with refugee organizations in recent days to prepare for the arrival of Afrikaners, according to a memorandum of the department obeyed by the New York Times.
According to the memorandum, the administration will help Afrikaners find “temporary homes or longer term” and “basic home furniture, essential household items and cleaning supplies.”
The administration also plans to help Afrikaners ensure “groceries, clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid climate phones, daily welfare of households,” said the memorandum.
