They Sold Everything. Then the Flight Was Canceled.
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What is the refugee program for white South Africans initiated by Trump?
In November 2025, the Trump administration launched a refugee resettlement program for white South Africans. The Afrikaners, as they're called, are an ethnic minority in South Africa. Last year, reports began surfacing that Black South Africans were terrorizing Afrikaner farmers, driving them from their land, setting fire to their property, even killing them and leaving their mangled bodies in mass graves. For the first few months of the second Trump administration, this was a major story. Democrats questioned the legitimacy of the accounts and accused Republicans of hypocrisy, letting in white refugees while trying to secure the southern border. The White House stayed the course, with President Trump going so far as to confront South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on the issue in the Oval Office.
All of which makes it so much more shocking that the story has all but disappeared. I'm Daily Wire DC Bureau Chief Tim Rice, and this is Behind the Story. Today, we're taking a second look at the Afrikaner refugees. How many have been resettled? How many are still stuck in South Africa?
What challenges do Afrikaner farmers face in South Africa?
And what happened to the story? Why did it disappear? Joining us to answer those questions and more is Daily Wire immigration reporter Jenny Tehr. Jenny recently took a slight detour from her usual beat to shed some light on this important issue. What she found was quite shocking and may have even nudged the Trump administration back into action on this issue. The headline was leftist group leaves white South African refugees out to dry while fighting Trump in court. Let's go behind the story. Jenny, thank you again for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Tim.
So I don't even really know where to start with this one. Why don't you just like take us back? You called me a couple of weeks ago to pitch the story. Why don't we just start there? Like, start with your original pitch, because it caught me so off guard, because frankly, I had kind of forgotten about this story, and what you told me shocked me back into awareness.
Totally. So, you know, I had learned about this situation of just the South African refugees being kind of left to their own devices. And there was a story that had been done in the free press before about what it was like here in the United States, their poor living conditions, that they were living in drug-infested neighborhoods.
Why did Democrats criticize the refugee program for white South Africans?
that they were just in really, really dilapidated areas of the country where crime was high and a lot of the nonprofits helping them weren't helping them. Now, I started to kind of peel away at that issue. And what I learned was that there is a whole class of refugees who have been approved to come to the United States and have been given that status. who are stuck in South Africa and have been for months. So they call themselves the limbo cases. They were told by this leftist group, the Church World Service, which is tasked by the United States with helping with refugee resettlement, and they handle it on both ends. So they'll help when they're in South Africa and then when they arrive in the U.S.
in a lot of cases. This group has advocated against the Trump administration refugee policy and has taken the Trump administration to court over it because they say that the Trump administration shouldn't be prioritizing that class of refugees and they think that they're leaving behind others in doing so. So while there's this apparent... conflict of interest, they're the ones who are supposed to be helping these refugees get here. Now what's happened with a lot of these people is that they were approved to come, they received approval from the United States, and CWS was helping facilitate their travel to the United States, booked their tickets, and said, you are going to be leaving. Usually a lot of them said they were told within days.
And so what happened then is you had this group of people that sold their belongings, sold their cars, homes, quit their jobs, basically were preparing to leave their whole life and livelihoods behind. And then the rug was pulled out from under them because this organization, Church World Service, let them know at the very last second that their trip was canceled, that they would have updates on their case in the future and would be working to reschedule their travel.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the refugee program for white South Africans initiated by Trump?
0:00–1:02
2
What challenges do Afrikaner farmers face in South Africa?
1:02–2:16
3
Why did Democrats criticize the refugee program for white South Africans?
2:16–5:47
4
What happened to the Afrikaner refugees after their flight was canceled?
5:47–15:04
5
How is Church World Service involved in the refugee resettlement process?
15:04–21:53
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Morning Wire
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