Flight sent to collect white South Africans granted asylum by Trump administration to U.S.

The Trump administration has sent a chartered passenger jet to South Africa to collect the first 49 members of the country’s white minority who have been granted asylum under the only U.S. refugee program that is currently functioning.

 

The white Afrikaners, who boarded the flight at a Johannesburg airport on Sunday night, are scheduled to arrive in Washington on Monday for a press conference with U.S. officials. Their plane, reportedly a Boeing 767, will then fly onward to Texas.

 

They are the first to be given refugee status under the special U.S. plan, established by President Donald Trump in February. He had suspended all other refugee programs when he was sworn into office in January.

 

The departure of the small group of Afrikaners was closely covered by South African television networks, which showed scenes of them with luggage carts as they checked in for the flight. Most refused to talk to local media and some were openly hostile, the networks said.

 

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told journalists on Friday that the Afrikaners are suffering “race-based persecution” and fit the “textbook definition” of refugees.

But statistically their incomes are far higher than those of the Black majority, their unemployment rate is much lower and they control the majority of farmland in the country. For decades, until 1994, they enjoyed special privileges under the apartheid system of white-minority rule.

 

South Africa’s government has denied that the Afrikaners are legitimate refugees, accusing Mr. Trump of launching a politically motivated scheme. None of the Afrikaners have gone through the normal screening process by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and the Trump administration has not explained how the Afrikaners qualify for refugee status.

 

The Afrikaners are benefiting from fast-tracked approvals after a speedy assessment by U.S. officials in South Africa.

 

They are landing in the United States just three months after Mr. Trump created the special program for them – unlike other refugees who usually wait at least 18 months, or sometimes years, to get permission to settle in the United States. And unlike other refugees under U.S. programs, they are receiving a free flight on a U.S.-organized chartered jet.

 

It is also highly unusual for refugees to be processed in their country of origin. They are usually assessed in neighbouring countries after fleeing their homeland because of wars or political persecution.

 

“The UN has not been involved in selecting these people for resettlement, as is usually the case,” said Jeff Crisp, an expert on asylum and migration at the University of Oxford and a former head of policy and development at UNHCR.

 

“Most seriously, there is no evidence that they have a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’ − the standard criterion for being granted asylum in another state,” Mr. Crisp told The Globe and Mail.

 

“In short, they are not refugees, and in using that label, the Trump administration’s initiative can be dismissed as a publicity stunt that is intended to please American racists.”

 

Many South Africans have ridiculed the Trump refugee program for Afrikaners. “They will be the richest, most pampered ‘refugees’ in the long and sad history of people displaced by war and victimization around the world,” said Tim Cohen, a South African commentator.

 

Of the estimated three million Afrikaners in South Africa, only about 8,000 have applied for the Trump refugee plan. Afrikaner lobby groups say the vast majority want to stay in South Africa.

After the first flight on Sunday night, other groups of Afrikaners are expected to be processed under the U.S. plan, but no permission has yet been requested for further chartered flights, South African officials say

 

They said the police and state security agency had vetted the departing Afrikaners to ensure that none of them had any criminal charges outstanding against them. Aside from the criminal check, the government says it is doing nothing else to impede their departure.

 

Mr. Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that the South African government is seizing land from white farmers, citing a newly approved expropriation law. No such cases have been documented in the 31 years since apartheid ended.

 

The Trump administration has also criticized South Africa on a range of other issues, including South Africa’s genocide complaint against Israel at the World Court.

 

South African deputy foreign minister Alvin Botes phoned his U.S. counterpart, Christopher Landau, on Friday to register his government’s concern about the U.S. refugee plan.

“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,” the government said in a statement after the call.

 

 

 

 

 

This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail