Afrikaners are STILL Not Refugees

But actual refugees suffer while this political farce plays on.

Last night, I had a breakdown in my closet after I watched PBS News Hour’s report on 59 white Afrikaners who received refugee status and arrived on a chartered plane yesterday.

This is not how I normally report on refugee resettlement news. I don’t particularly think the emotions of a white journalist matter much compared to the scope of the global tragedy we’re witnessing in real time. At the end of June 2024, there were 43.7 million refugees globally, all of whose suffering should be centered—and usually is when I write about it. But after almost a decade of approaching this subject from every direction I can think of, begging people to care, being thoughtful and nuanced and measured, things have become so utterly bonkers that this is the truest report I can give.

I cried in my closet last night because yesterday, the White House also released a statement that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghans in the US will be revoked next week: on May 20, 2025.

---

Afghans inside and outside of the US and their advocates have fought long and hard to be considered refugees; some of them qualify for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) status that is granted to people whose assistance for the US government in Iraq or Afghanistan offer them resettlement in the US. But after the combined disastrous policies under multiple US presidents, ending in a chaotic withdrawal under Biden in 2021, the best that many Afghans could receive was TPS.

Even under other presidential administrations, TPS is an ad-hoc program that leaves groups of people in legal and emotional limbo. They’re here as long as the president wills it. We’ve seen TPS revoked for so many other groups in the last few months, so this is not exactly a surprise.

Perhaps I should be immune to this by now. But I’m not. Like many other people in 2021, for weeks, I fought tooth and nail day in and day out to try to secure a way out of Afghanistan for hundreds of people. My phone number made the rounds internationally as Afghans looked for anyone who could help them. I got desperate, heartrending messages day and night from people begging me to adopt their babies, find them a seat on a plane, smuggle their mother or sister out. I became part of a global network of people who worked to protect Afghan lives as the Taliban took over the country and our nation turned our back on some of our staunchest allies.

I wrote about it for the Texas Observer, in a feature that remains one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.

When I thought about what a private plane might have meant to the people who told me their stories day and night in Afghanistan… What it would still mean for the beloved Syrian family I’ve written about for years who are still not reunited after almost a decade of trying to prove to the US government that they deserve to be together… What it would mean for the hundreds of people illegally deported to a prison in El Salvador, many of whom were here legally under the TPS program for Venezuela… I broke down last night.

The miracle that every deserving family around the world wants more than anything—a plane that will take them to someplace welcoming, safe, and free—is offered to white people made uncomfortable by some new policies in South Africa.

---

---

Once again, the White House is flipping the script, and describing a law designed to overcome South Africa’s Apartheid as ‘racist,’ rather than a counterbalance to the actual racist policies of Apartheid. “Today, the White House alleges that a new South African law which redistributes unused land to the state is being racist, and that the white minority is being persecuted by Black-led government,” PBS News Hour reports.

In February, I wrote “Afrikaners Are Not Refugees” for this newsletter. In that piece, I talked about South Africa’s Expropriation Act, which President Cyril Ramaphosa had just signed into law—the act was designed to determine how land can be redistributed. In the early days of Apartheid in 1950, the white National Party seized most of the land in South Africa. Today, white South Africans (8% of the population) control about 75% of the land, in comparison to Black South Africans (80% of the population), who control 4% of the privately held land. The Expropriation Act lays out how land can be taken and used for the public good.

No one is saying the Expropriation Act isn’t controversial; it is. It certainly makes some white South Africans angry and uncomfortable.

However, it’s not “a genocide that’s taking place,” as Trump claimed in the Roosevelt Room after the white people from South Africa arrived. In the PBS News Hour report, Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch said the claim of genocide is “not factually supported, by any evidence we’ve seen” (the nicest way to call ‘bs’ I’ve ever heard).

However, Genocide Watch reports that the “Taliban are committing a slow genocide by attrition against Hazaras.” The Shi’a religious minority “have faced relentless persecution, genocidal massacres, the bombing of their mosques and schools, and attacks on their maternity clinics, including mass murders of Hazara mothers, babies, and school children.” And women in Afghanistan are now denied the most basic freedoms, which Genocide Watch (along with many legal scholars) calls “gender apartheid.”

The Afrikaners received refugee resettlement—which is supposed to be an in-depth screening process that normally takes years—in three months.

They were flown over on a chartered State Department plane. Usually, the International Organization of Migration offers travel loans that all refugees must pay back. After years of vetting, refugees have always arrived several thousand dollars in debt.

Remember: the US government has repeatedly claimed in court that they cannot possibly send a plane to El Salvador to bring back the people who they wrongfully deported. But white South African farmers? Not a problem. They’re not even trying to hide the hypocrisies.

To watch while the entire resettlement program, which I described in After the Last Border as one of the most beautiful, public/private partnerships in our nation’s history, is intentionally destroyed by a US president is awful enough. But because I know people who are currently waiting—like Hasna’s son and his family in Jordan, who we were going to privately sponsor through Welcome Corps before Trump came to power; like the Afghans blowing up my phone this morning who would do anything to keep their loved ones safe and free—I understand what a slap in the face this whole charade is.

I’m not the only one saying this, of course. Jack Jenkins of NPR reported that the Episcopal Church refuses to resettle the Afrikaners, ending a nearly forty-year relationship with the federal government. Trying to resettle Afrikaners crosses what the presiding bishop of the church, the Most. Rev. Sean W. Rowe, called “a moral line.” Episcopal Migration Ministries will not offer aid to the Afrikaners and will end its government contracts at the end of this year.

I’m heartbroken for the people I know who worked at EMM, and I’m also grateful for their moral courage in this time.

---

After the Afrikaners landed, the Department of State shared a video in which Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted the group of white people waving US flags: “Welcome, welcome to the United States of America! When you have quality seeds, you can put them in foreign soil and they will blossom, they will bloom.”

“Quality seeds” couldn’t be a more blatantly racist term. What happened yesterday is evil. And the only call to action I have is to cling to the truth.

Refugee resettlement may never recover from two Trump administrations. But no matter how they change the story, we cannot forget the truth. Afrikaners are still not refugees. Actual refugees still deserve our attention, respect, and advocacy.

Don’t let the people in power change the stories; call out the media when they start using the wrong terms. Don’t let this administration get away with naming discomfort ‘genocide.’ Don’t let them reframe angry Afrikaners as ‘refugees.’ Commit to knowing and sharing the truth—even if it seems to matter less and less every day.

After almost ten years of doing everything in my power to tell the stories of how racism in our country continues to affect vulnerable people, I have no other calls to action. If you know of ways to help, please share them in the comments.

Grief and shame overwhelm me today.