President Donald Trump has quietly accomplished something remarkable with America's refugee program.
And judging by the reaction from the political left, he's struck a nerve.
According to State Department data highlighted by economist Steve Rattner, approximately 98 percent of refugees admitted to the United States between February 2025 and July 2026 came from one country.
South Africa.
Of the 10,764 refugees admitted during that period, 10,597 were South Africans. Only 167 came from anywhere else.
98% of the refugees admitted to the U.S. under Trump have been white South Africans. https://t.co/phK4RQAyzP
— Steve Rattner (@SteveRattner) October 27, 2026
This is a huge departure from the immigration priorities of the former Biden administration.
During fiscal year 2026, the United States admitted 16,292 refugees. According to the State Department, 16,287 came from South Africa. The remaining five came from Afghanistan.
That's 99.97 percent of refugee admissions from one country during the fiscal year.
For context, the Biden administration admitted 100,034 refugees in fiscal year 2024, drawing from countries throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Trump hasn't merely reduced the refugee program. He has fundamentally changed its ethnic composition.
And the beneficiaries are overwhelmingly Afrikaners, South Africa's predominantly white, Afrikaans-speaking minority.
Predictably, the Left is furious. The leftist outlet Truthout published an article Wednesday denouncing the policy as "openly white supremacist."
That's an unhinged accusation from people who see race and ethnicity as the means to “fundamentally transform” America and to gain political power.
Apparently, admitting people because they face persecution from black South Africans becomes an act of “bigotry” because they happen to be white.
Trump's administration says Afrikaners face discriminatory government policies, threats to property rights and concerns about violence in their communities.
His critics counter-argue that white genocide isn’t “real,” citing a court ruling, and while there are high-profile cases of “farm murders,” the state-sanctioned expropriation of land isn’t occurring.
Before getting into this sticky set of competing arguments, a bit of context is in order. This comes via Agence France Press.
There were more than 27,600 murders in the 2023/24 financial year, police statistics say. This averages to just over 75 a day.
Most of the victims were young, black men in urban areas, the statistics show.
On farms, plots, small holdings and other agriculture land, there were 436 murders in 2024, according to police figures that include farmers — who are mostly white — and black farm workers.
Statistics from the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA) show farm murders average about 50 a year across all races.
The AFP article then attributes the issue to a general economic insecurity problem.
While still a shocking problem, the murder of white farmers is part of a larger insecurity issue in the country, officials say.
The vast majority (82 percent) of South Africa’s population of 63 million is black, with white South Africans making up just over seven percent, according to the latest figures from mid-2024.
The white population is largely made up of people descended from English settlers or the mainly Dutch colonisers who landed at the Cape around 300 years ago and speak Afrikaans.
There are a combination of issues here when leftists complain that Trump’s arguments of white persecution are unfounded, because there is no “white genocide” going on in South Africa.
Organizations such as the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa and AfriForum have documented these incidents in detail, recording roughly 50 farm-related murders a year in recent periods and higher numbers of attacks; their long-term tallies since 1990 list more than 2,000 such murders, with white commercial farmers and their relatives forming the large majority of owner-victims.
Because whites continue to own most privately held commercial farmland, they are disproportionately represented among the targets of these robberies and attacks. High-profile killings have repeatedly drawn protests, memorials, and political statements, keeping the issue visible even when absolute numbers remain small relative to the country’s overall murder total of roughly 25,000–27,000 a year.
Official statistics on the phenomenon are limited. The South African Police Service does not routinely publish comprehensive breakdowns of crime by the race of victims or offenders, and its dedicated tracking of farm attacks has been incomplete and intermittent — fuller series existed into the mid-2000s, after which gaps appeared and the figures were later folded into broader rural or agricultural categories.
When the police have released racial details in response to external claims (as occurred in 2025), the small quarterly counts have shown a mix of black and white victims, including farm workers and dwellers as well as owners. Independent inquiries, most notably the 2003 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, and subsequent criminological research have identified robbery as the dominant motive, with political or explicitly racial motives appearing in only a small fraction of examined cases.
Regardless of the motivation, Afrikaners face lawlessness and crime in their home country, and may seek asylum due to concerns about personal safety; due to international law, however, their identities need to fall under “protected categories.” Simply being a human being does not cut it.
Under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention (and national laws that implement it, including the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980), a “refugee” is someone outside their country who has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and who is unable or unwilling to avail themselves of their country’s protection.
Generalized fear of crime, high crime rates, or ordinary personal-safety concerns do not by themselves qualify. Crime is not automatically “persecution.” Adjudicators generally require a nexus between the feared harm and one of the five protected grounds.
The state must also be unable or unwilling to provide protection. High levels of criminal violence that affect the population broadly are usually treated as generalized lawlessness rather than targeted persecution.
This is a status quo that should be challenged: human rights need to be reoriented to individual rights. Judging people’s worth for being granted safety from persecution should not come down to “protected status” as adjudicated by the political establishment.
As I reported October 10, Trump has sharply curtailed legal immigration alongside his much-publicized crackdown on illegal border crossings.
An analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute found that monthly entries through major legal immigration categories had fallen by approximately 145,000, compared with a decline of roughly 53,000 illegal entries.
The administration has tightened restrictions affecting immigrant visas, international students, temporary foreign workers, family immigration and refugee resettlement.
The refugee numbers show how dramatically that last category has changed. And the policy is not merely a temporary exception.
In September, Trump established a ceiling of 17,500 refugees for fiscal year 2027, specifying that admissions would be allocated primarily to Afrikaners from South Africa.
The official presidential determination cites humanitarian concerns and the national interest.
In its notification to Congress, the administration also said it anticipated that Afrikaners would assimilate successfully while preserving taxpayer resources.
This has triggered the activist left. Writing in The Hill, Rick Santos of Church World Service condemned the policy under the headline: "Selective sanctuary: America's 'White South Africans Only' refugee policy is wrong."
Santos argued that the administration has abandoned the bipartisan refugee program and excluded vulnerable people from other countries.
"America has a long history of welcoming those fleeing persecution," he wrote. He also called for a refugee system operating "regardless of where they come from, the color of their skin, or what faith they practice."
This is predictably idealistic. Yet it misses that there are practical considerations that every nation should take into account when it accepts immigrants of any kind.
How are applicants vetted? How effectively will newcomers integrate into American communities? Will they likely use public welfare?
The administration's own estimate puts the potential resettlement cost of its fiscal year 2027 plan at approximately $500 million. But that's the tip of the iceberg for the costs to Americans of immigration writ large.
As I previously noted, the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed federal survey data and estimated that 53 percent of immigrant-headed households used at least one major welfare program in 2024, compared with 37 percent of U.S.-born-headed households.
These jaw-dropping numbers illustrate why immigration cannot be discussed without considering the welfare state and the costs of public services.
Trump has moved beyond controlling illegal border crossings to reshaping who receives permission to enter the United States legally.
Whether or not you agree with Trump’s selectivity on who should be granted refugee status, America is making progress. The endless stream of refugees into the country is over.
