The Trump administration carved out an exception to its refugee ban for white South Africans. But other groups, including Afghans who helped U.S. forces during the war in their country, are being shut out.
On the same day that dozens of white South Africans arrived in the United States as refugees, at the invitation of President Trump himself, his administration said thousands of Afghans could be deported starting this summer.
Mr. Trump’s immigration policies are riddled with contradictions, epitomized by Monday’s arrival of a chartered jet, paid for by the American government, carrying dozens of Afrikaners who say they are facing racial discrimination at home.
The Trump administration’s focus on white Afrikaners, an ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid, is particularly striking as it effectively bans most other refugees and targets legal and illegal immigrants alike for deportation. Those include Afghans who were granted “temporary protected status” after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, many of whom had risked their lives to help American forces.
Mr. Trump’s hard line on immigration helped propel him back to the White House as voters from both parties expressed frustration over the issue. He has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, and one of the first executive orders of his second term was to suspend refugee resettlement in the United States.
But the administration’s decision to carve out an exception for white Afrikaners has raised questions about who the “right” immigrants are, in Mr. Trump’s view.
Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, who greeted the Afrikaner refugees on Monday, told reporters that the group had been “carefully vetted.”
