Trump’s Afrikaner refugee policy based on unfounded claims about land, white farmer ‘genocide’

President Donald Trump recently allowed 59 white Afrikaner farmers to resettle in the U.S. as refugees, saying they are losing their land in South Africa and are targets of genocide.

When a reporter asked May 12 why he created an expedited path for Afrikaners, Trump said, "Because they're being killed. And we don't want to see people be killed. But it's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about."

Trump added, "White farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa."

Trump has shared versions of this narrative since 2018, as have others in his orbit, including Elon Musk, a Trump adviser from South Africa.

Trump’s decision about resettling Afrikaners was a reversal; he suspended all U.S. refugee admissions after taking office.

The South African government criticized Trump's Feb. 7 executive order on allowing Afrikaner resettlement in the U.S. 

"It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship," the statement said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is slated to visit the White House on May 21. 

White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.

"The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false," said Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. 

"As an independent Institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world."

There are about 2.7 million white Afrikaners, who are descendants of Dutch and French settlers, in South Africa. About 80% of the people living in South Africa are Black. From 1948 until the early 1990s, South Africa lived under apartheid rule, racial segregation that gave only white people power and forced Black South Africans to live separately from white people. 

South Africa crime data and its limitations

In response to our email seeking evidence for Trump’s statements, the White House provided no data. A spokesperson said Afrikaners told U.S. officials about violent attacks, death threats, vandalism and racial slurs against farmers. 

Newham said the primary motive for almost all farm attacks is robbery, which has long been documented.

"Attacks where there may be evidence of racial or political motives (i.e. slogans written on the wall at a scene of a crime, or words spoken by the attacker according to the victim), are exceedingly rare and make up only a few percent of the cases recorded," Newham said.

The majority of murder victims nationwide are poor, under- or unemployed young Black males, Newham said.

"Murder victimisation is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race," Newham said. About half of murders take place in about 12% of the precincts, "primarily townships or poor areas in metropolitan cities mostly populated by black African people."

The South African Police Service’s crime report for the period from April 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023, shows there were 51 murders on farms of a total of 27,494 murders nationwide. But the data has limitations. 

The race of farm murder victims is not consistently recorded in official data, said Anthony Kaziboni, a senior researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa.

While anecdotal evidence suggests many victims are white, other victims are Black or nonwhite, Kaziboni said. "Media reports sometimes mention race, but these are sporadic and not methodologically robust enough to support claims of systemic racial targeting."

Nechama Brodie, a journalist who wrote a book on farm murders and has fact-checked the topic, told PolitiFact that the South African Police Services has not always been effective at creating a farm murder count. One challenge is deciding who is counted as a farmer because there are commercial farms and "smallholdings," which can simply be plots of land. 

Brodie said AfriForum, a nongovernmental organization focused on Afrikaners, is one of the more reliable sources of information about killings of white Afrikaans-speaking farmers. AfriForum data, which is based on information from police, private security services, victims and media reports, showed about 50 farm murders a year. 

Brodie said that a white farm owner’s death is more likely to be covered in the news than the killing of a rural smallholder. The majority of the country's smallholders and rural residents are Black. 

"South African media coverage of murder victims is extremely selective, and creates a false depiction of who is most at risk," Brodie said.

 Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, right, greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa on May 12 at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia. (AP)

No evidence that South Africa has sponsored or organized killings to destroy a group

We asked the State Department for evidence of a genocide of white farmers in South Africa, and a spokesperson said the department had nothing to announce regarding a genocide determination. 

The official definition of genocide, written in 1948 following negotiations led by the United Nations, is killing, causing bodily harm, preventing births, or forcing the transferral of children "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." 

The definition includes no guidance on absolute numbers or percentages required to qualify as genocide.

There are many arguments about the definition of genocide, said Richard Breitman, an American University distinguished professor emeritus and author of books about the Holocaust.

"But many specialists regard the intent to destroy an entire ethnic, religious, or national group as essential," Breitman said. "It is not strictly a matter of numbers of victims, but of an organized effort, usually by a government or a political organization, to target a large percentage of a defined enemy group."

Experts rejected the "genocide" characterization of Afrikaners.

"There is no indication of a state-sponsored campaign or intent to eliminate a specific racial group," Kaziboni said. "The primary motive remains robbery, sometimes coupled with extreme violence, consistent with broader patterns of violent crime in South Africa."

The term genocide evokes the horrors of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where 800,000 Tutsis were systematically killed, Kaziboni said. 

"Against this backdrop and the UN’s legal definition, labelling farm killings as genocide is both inaccurate and misleading," Kaziboni said. "This does not diminish the severity of the violence or the need for enhanced rural safety, but it highlights the importance of responding with evidence, nuance, and context."

Jean-Yves Camus, co-director at the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, said the issue "needs to be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity."

In most cases, new land law requires payment to owners

During apartheid, nonwhite families lost their homes and land. When apartheid ended in the mid-1990s, the government passed laws to help Black South Africans recover from decades of discrimination and abuse. 

Ramaphosa signed a bill in January that spells out procedures for the government to take land for a public purpose. The bill calls for compensating landowners, with some exceptions such as if the land isn’t being used or the owner’s main purpose is not to develop the land. 

The circumstances when payment isn’t required are "very limited," wrote Zsa-Zsa Temmers Boggenpoel, a Stellenbosch University professor who lectures about property law.

"In South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, land distribution was grossly unequal on the basis of race," Boggenpoel wrote. "The country is still suffering the effects of this. So expropriation of property is a potential tool to reduce land inequality. This has become a matter of increasing urgency. South Africans have expressed impatience with the slow pace of land reform."

The main objective of the new law is to allow the government to legally take abandoned or underused land — such as hundreds of buildings in Johannesburg that have been abandoned by their owners and taken over by slumlords and people involved in organized crime, Newham said.

Experts told us that no land seizures have taken place yet.

"There is no evidence of systematic land confiscation targeting white farmers or anyone else," Kaziboni said.

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