US rejects dozens of Afrikaner refugee applicants as 13,000 resettle

More than 13,000 white South Africans have moved to the United States under a refugee programme opened by President Donald Trump in February 2025, and dozens of applicants have since been told they are ineligible, in letters that cannot be appealed.

As The Guardian reported on 15 September, rejection letters began reaching applicants on 30 June. The programme was expanded to cover members of a racial minority, and the first group of 68 white South Africans arrived in the US in May 2025. Arrivals are accelerating. State department figures show more than 2,600 people were admitted in August alone.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) does not publish how many applications it has received or how many it has rejected. One WhatsApp group set up for people who were turned down, called Hope beyond the Letter, had 311 members on 10 September, according to an administrator who said the number moves up and down.

The rejection letters give no reason. Applicants who filed Freedom of Information Act requests have obtained more detail. One administrator, a 64 year old freelance television professional who asked not to be named, learned that his case had first been recommended for approval. The recommendation was reversed because his former girlfriend, with whom he had applied, had a marijuana conviction. He received the letter on 30 June, having completed screening in November.

“I cried like a baby,” he told The Guardian. “It was something I actually believed was attainable. I believed the hype.”

A farm couple who had already sold up

A couple identified only as Pieter and Liesl were told in November that they were conditionally approved. Both are Afrikaners, both had a grandparent killed on a farm, and both were managing a farm when they applied. Pieter was convicted of trespassing in 2014, paid a fine and did not go to court, and held temporary US work visas for farm work between 2011 and 2024. Their youngest daughter was born in the United States and is a US citizen.

In the response to their information request, they found that USCIS had recorded the child’s nationality as South African and had noted that she would be left behind if they moved. They had already sold their house, their car and much of what they owned when the rejection letter arrived on 24 July.

“We have to start all over again,” Pieter said.

A 67 year old applicant said he believed his rejection, and his wife’s, came from misunderstandings caused by his not being able to make his case in Afrikaans. The reasons given to him were a crime involving moral turpitude, and the commission of acts of torture or extrajudicial killing. He acknowledged shooting at least one black person in 1995 while working as a security guard, and said it was self defence during a mass break in at an alcohol shop. He was not charged.

USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler did not address individual cases. In an emailed response he said the Department of Homeland Security is committed to resettling Afrikaner refugees who are being persecuted by the South African government, and that each application is reviewed case by case. Applicants found ineligible, including for public safety concerns or criminal histories, are notified and cannot appeal.

What the numbers say here

For a South African reader, the figures that matter are the ones about this country. About 38% of black South Africans are unemployed, against about 9% of white South Africans, according to official data. That gap is the product of a labour market that has not absorbed the majority three decades after apartheid, and of an economy that has grown too slowly to create work at the rate the population needs. Broad based black economic empowerment and affirmative action were designed as a correction to a century of deliberate exclusion, and they remain contested in their design and their reach.

Crime affects everyone in this country, and the murder of farm dwellers, black and white, is a documented and serious problem that the South African Police Service investigates through its rural safety structures. The claim that white South Africans face persecution as a group is not supported by the official crime data, and the South African government has rejected it.

The programme has a second consequence that is easy to miss. When the US opened the route to Afrikaners, it closed its refugee programme to people fleeing war and persecution elsewhere. That decision was made in Washington, and it affects families far beyond South Africa’s borders.

The applicants in this story made a decision that no one should have to make on incomplete information. They sold homes, farms and vehicles on the strength of a letter that said they were conditionally approved, and the reversal arrived without reasons they could test. USCIS has said the ineligibility decisions are final and are not open to appeal. Whether it will publish the totals, and whether the programme continues at the pace of the past three months, is now a question for the department in Washington that runs it.