Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Given the inflammatory rhetoric from top administration officials and the violent ICE crackdowns across the country, the White House’s anti-immigrant agenda is by now very clear. Less well-known, however, is the way the White House has transformed the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) – historically a legal pathway for those fleeing violence, religious persecution, or political instability – into a fast track program for white South Africans.
On January 20, 2025, Trump issued an executive order suspending USRAP, pledging “to admit only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States.” Once the program restarted, refugee admissions essentially ended for all but one group: White people from South Africa. This policy change originates in Trump’s belief in the conspiracy theory that there is a ‘white genocide’ in that country.
The Trump administration lowered the admissions ceiling from 125,000 to 7,500, which it declared it intended to “primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa.” That ceiling was eventually raised to 17,500. Figure 1 shows the overall number of refugees admitted under the USRAP program (reported as fiscal years, October-September) from 1980 to 2026.
More remarkable than the overall decline is the extent to which refugee admissions are now entirely from South Africa. The New York Times reported that in the first weeks of the Trump administration, under its “Mission South Africa” project, teams of workers arrived in Pretoria and converted office space into refugee processing centers. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees who had already been vetted were left stranded in other countries.
In the most recent fiscal year (2026), there were 12,904 refugees admitted to the United States. All but three were from South Africa. This trend goes back to the beginning of the Trump administration. Figure 2 shows refugee admissions from February 2025 through September 2026, from South Africa and from all other countries in the world combined.
Historically, refugee admissions from different parts of the world have fluctuated based on political events or other crises. Figure 3 shows refugee flows from world regions in recent years (The Africa totals exclude South Africa) and those from South Africa.
The administration has reportedly notified Congress that its plan for the 2027 fiscal year is to keep the cap at 17,500, with a continued priority on fast tracking whites from South Africa. It estimates the cost to be about $500 million. Considered alongside other immigration policy measures – most significantly, the termination of Temporary Protected Status that will likely affect hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants – the intent of the Trump administration could not be any clearer.
This first appeared on CEPR.
