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Chapter 1: 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?
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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. But here they are months later, still no answers from Church World Service or the United States government.
Yeah.
So there is a lot to unpack there. And I wanted to talk about the sort of the two different groups of refugees, those that are in limbo there and those that are sort of fallen on hard times here. But let's put a pin in that because I think the thing that struck me the most and I think what's probably striking our listeners the most is that this group, as you said, not only a leftist group.
But a group that is actively not just opposed to, but suing, right, like suing the Trump administration to block this policy is also responsible for facilitating the beneficiaries of this policy. How on earth does that work?
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Chapter 4: What happened to the Afrikaner refugees after their flight was canceled?
How is that possible? Because there's room here, right? I think that's the important thing. Like, it's not, this is, am I wrong? This is this group, Christian World Services, is making this decision, right? It's not that there's something happening in the States that is being communicated to them, right? They're just telling them that they have to stay?
So it's partially, you know, the U.S. government that has to approve these cases and process them. And then it's Church World Service that's relaying information to these individuals and also helping them throughout the refugee resettlement process, which includes for a lot of these people that are now left behind. Their medical evaluations, they expire after a period of six months.
So that means for these people who a lot of times now have sold off their cars, sometimes have to travel hours away, get hotel rooms. redo vaccines, redo testing, spend a full day with the United Nations workers to get this done. But Church World Service, in that case, I've heard from several of these Afrikaner refugees, has also left them hanging there.
So they're not even getting information on rescheduling those appointments so that they can stay up to date with their cases and say, we'll be ready whenever It's almost like this whole thing is being stalled. And what's really insane to think about is how much the refugee program has been cutting. So you would think that there's more resources for this.
Like you said, it seems like we can take in these people. The Trump administration cut the refugee program, said we're no longer having annual admissions of 125,000 people. He started out and said 7,500, that's the cap, mainly Afrikaners from South Africa. So initially, that was a major, major change to the program that, again, you would think would free up resources, people.
The processing times maybe would have gotten quicker.
Right.
But it just hasn't. And now the Trump administration is saying they're expanding the program again to accommodate Afrikaners and saying we're going to add about 10,000 to that cap. So now it's about 17,000 that they're going to let in.
The reason your story, I think, was so impactful is because you spoke to so many of these people. And so talk to us a little bit about that. How did you find them? What sort of things? Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the ones who are here in the States because you kind of already summarized what it's like for those who are stuck in South Africa.
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Chapter 5: How is Church World Service involved in the refugee resettlement process?
This is what they're used to. Two things make this shocking. One is what you just lined out, which is that these are people who are often more educated, more ready to assimilate, speak the language, and are actively saying, we don't want this. But the second thing that's crazy to me is that these are, in a large part, by and large, they're farmers. They're agricultural workers.
This is a problem that we have in our country today. We don't have enough. Why aren't we getting these people to Iowa, to farmland? And I think this gets to a bigger question, which is why isn't the Trump administration more involved in this?
Yeah, well, it's a good point because I have heard stories of some of them who are placed in areas of the country where their background is farming, like you said, and they're nowhere near farmland. But a lot of them, too, that I've spoken with are farmers. uh, you know, software engineers, sales people, business owners. Um, they've worked in international companies.
So a lot of their skills can translate here, but I'll give you one example that I found really shocking was that one of these families was brought to Chicago and they were placed by an NGO in housing where they were surrounded by, uh, basically illegal immigrants in their neighborhoods, at every store they went to. And when they tried to find jobs,
They were rejected because they didn't speak Spanish. And they just started thinking, what did we just come to? And kind of lost hope in like the future that they had here and ended up taking matters into their own hands and moving to Georgia where they could find a job that would see their English language skills as a benefit. Which is just shocking to see.
But we know Chicago, obviously, you know, this is the result of Chicago taking in so many illegal immigrants during the Biden administration that some areas have just become unrecognizable and have been completely transformed. I mean, this woman who... I spoke with said that she didn't come here to be in Mexico. She came here to be in the United States. And that's just not what Chicago was.
But she's much happier in Georgia now where her husband works. Her daughter's there. She's 15. And they can have a better life and a better quality of life. And they really just didn't get a lot of help from the NGOs. And again, they took matters into their own hands. that's kind of the way these people are too. They're very much like pull yourself up from your bootstraps type of people.
And again, the Trump administration sees that as a benefit, but I'm not sure if they're aware of all of these issues going on that I think, you know, is the reason why our reporting is so important here is because maybe this can get to the right people and,
And I think that's why these Afrikaners are really trusting of us and want to speak out because they want the Trump administration to know about these challenges that they're facing.
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