Despite holding a strong stance against immigration and asylum seekers in general, the Trump administration is supporting a group of White South African refugees whose admission to the United States it wants to expedite.
Besides seeding the monologues of late night comedians who feed on irony, the choice of this particular group as the lone exception intentionally subverts the image most people have in mind when they think of “refugee.”
(“Refugee” tends to summon images of the have-nots — destitute people from war-torn or poverty-stricken environments who arrive in the U.S. or other advanced nations with little to nothing.}
The Trump-favored White Afrikaners from South Africa, instead, are part of a demographic more commonly associated — because of the long history of apartheid — with the oppressor class rather than the oppressed.
But President Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller — pushing for asylum for the White Afrikaners — contends the purpose of the U.S. refugee program is widely misunderstood and that it has been misused as an ineffectual weapon against poverty.
“What’s happening in South Africa fits the text book definition of why the refugee program was created,” Miller says. He adds that the refugee program was “not intended as a solution for global poverty.”
Miller: The US refugee program in America has been a catastrophic failure. If you look for example at the Twin Cities area… pic.twitter.com/Nl4ZI5wWd7
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 9, 2025
The refugee program is instead meant, in Miller’s view, to provide sanctuary only from persecution — not poverty. Miller claims the program is in this sense directly applicable to White South Africans who he and the administration say are being subjected to “race-based persecution” at home.
(Miller offers the definition “persecution based on a protected characteristic.”)
Miller says the U.S. refugee program has been a “catastrophic failure” and specifically cites the Twin Cities region as an example of what he characterizes as the failure of refugees to thrive or to contribute to the community.
There is “endemic poverty, crime issues, integration issues,” he says, a comment that gets both support and blowback in the comments.
“The refugee program isn’t the problem. The problem is racists like Miller rewriting history to fit their fear,” writes one dissenter.
Another writes: “I live in Minneapolis and it’s just fine, lol.” (This comment is met with murder statistics for the Twin Cities area, which have not plummeted in step with the drops in cities across the nation.)
NOTE: President Trump suspended nearly all refugee resettlement program via an Executive Order during his first week in office, vowing a “realignment of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”
As the New York Times reported on the exception being made for the South Africans: “Although the president halted virtually all other refugee admissions shortly after he took office in January, his administration hastily put together a program to allow in white South Africans, who he claims have been the victims of racial persecution in their home country.”