“Thousands” of white South African refugees may be in the United States by the end of the summer as massive amounts of applications from Afrikaners — an ethnic minority in the country — continue to pour in, the Daily Caller reported.
A U.S. Department of State official told the outlet on Friday that the Trump administration is hoping to take in many more than the small group of 59 Afrikaners that arrived in Washington, DC, last month.
“We won’t be talking about dozens of arrivals, but hundreds and perhaps thousands,” the official said. While they did not specify an exact time frame, the official added that “we’ll start to massively scale this up” towards the “second half of summer.”
Referring to a backlog of more than 50,000 applications for refugee status from Afrikaners, who frequently face political and racial violence in their home country, the official added that this number will “continue to rise.”
As the first group of a few dozen Afrikaners was welcomed into the U.S. by the State Department on May 12, President Donald Trump blasted the establishment media for refusing to cover the “genocide” taking place against white farmers in South Africa.
“It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about, but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place, and farmers are being killed,” Trump told reporters in the White House. “They happen to be white, but whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me.”
“But white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa, and the newspapers and the media — television media — doesn’t even talk about it,” he continued. “If it were the other way around, they’d talk about it. That would be the only story they’d talk about.”
According to the State Department official, every Afrikaner who has been granted refugee status in the U.S. thus far “has demonstrated a persecution claim.”
“People have suffered attacks on their farms that were racially motivated,” they explained.
Despite the allegations of persecution against white people in his country, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly insisted that they are not victims, Breitbart News reported.
“They are leaving because they don’t want to embrace the changes taking place in our country in accordance with our Constitution,” Ramaphosa claimed soon after news broke of the first group of refugees.
Speaking to reporters a short while later, the president called the refugees “cowardly” for “running away.”
Ramaphosa even went so far as to defend violent political chants calling to “Kill the Boer” and to “Kill the Farmer,” arguing that his country simply values “freedom of expression.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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