Trump caps refugee admissions at record low – with most to be white South Africans

The Trump administration will limit the number of refugees admitted to the US to 7,500 over the next year, and give priority to white South Africans.

The move, announced in a notice published on Thursday, marks a dramatic cut from the previous limit of 125,000 set by former President Joe Biden and will bring the cap to a record low.

No reason was given for the cut, but the notice said it was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.

In January, Trump signed an executive order suspending the US Refugee Admissions Programme, or USRAP, which he said would allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.

The previous lowest refugee admissions cap was set by the first Trump administration in 2020, when it allocated 15,000 spots for fiscal year 2021.

The notice posted to the website of the Federal Register said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.

In February, the US president announced the suspension of critical aid to South Africa and offered to allow members of the Afrikaner community – who are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers – to settle in the US as refugees.

South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was later expelled after accusing Trump of “mobilising a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle”.

In the Oval Office in May, Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and claimed white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.

The White House also played a video which they said showed burial sites for murdered white farmers. It later emerged that the videos were scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.

The tense meeting came just days after the US granted asylum to 60 Afrikaners.

The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other White South Africans are being persecuted.

On his first day in office on 20 January, Trump said the US would suspend USRAP to reflect the US’s lack of “ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans” and “protects their safety and security”.

The US policy of accepting white South Africans has already prompted accusations of unfair treatment from refugee advocacy groups.

Some have argued the US is now effectively shut to other persecuted groups or people facing potential harm in their home country, and even former allies that helped US forces in Afghanistan or the Middle East.

“This decision doesn’t just lower the refugee admissions ceiling,” Global Refuge CEO and president Krish O’Mara Vignarajah said on Thursday. “It lowers our moral standing.”

“At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility,” she added.

The South African government has yet to respond to the latest announcement.

During the Oval Office meeting, President Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Trump’s] head”.

Earlier this year, Ramaphosa signed a controversial law allowing the government to seize privately-owned land without compensation in some circumstances.

While the country does not release race-based crime figured, figures published earlier this year showed that 7,000 people were murdered in South African between October and December 2024.

Of these, 12 were killed in farm attacks and only one of the 12 was a farmer. Five others were farm dwellers and four were employees, who are likely to have been black.