White South Africans Granted Refugee Status by Trump Leave for U.S.

A charter plane financed by the United States that transported dishes of White South Africans that claim to have been victims of discrimination in their country of origin left Johannesburg on Sunday, addressing the United States, where the Trump administration welcomes them as refugees.

The departure of the White South Africans, whom they say they denied jobs and have been attacked by violence due to their race, was a remarkable development in the redefinition of President Trump of US foreign policy.

Trump has arrested Virtualy all refugee admissions for people fleeing from the famine and the war of places like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But he has created an accelerated path in the country for Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that created and directed the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa.

The refugee process often takes years. But only three months have passed since Trump signed an executive order that established the refugee status for Afrikaners to the first cohort that is directed to the United States.

Align to see the flight on Sunday night at the O Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg stirred the questions of the journalists, saying that the United States embassy told them not to talk to the media. The parents, with children in tow, pushed cars stacked with luggage and spoke in silence between them.

One of the travelers briefly broke a smile when asked if he would miss Rugby, a favorite sport from Afrikaners and Biltong, a popular beef snack. But the police occasionally rebuked journalists, saying that they did not want to antagonize the Afrikaners.

In total, 49 Afrikaners were addressing the flight, according to a spokesman for the Airport authority of South Africa.

While administration officials plan to celebrate Afrikaners upon arrival scheduled on Monday morning in Washington, help groups, immigrant rights activists and the government and the South African public have criticized the initial refuge.

Even some leading Afrikaner activists in South Africa have said they would prefer if Trump provides support to build a better life at home.

The Afrikaner refugee program seems to have deepened tensions in an already stable relationship between South Africa and the United States.

Although Trump has equated the efforts of the South African government to undo the racial inequalities created by apartheid for anti-white discrimination, South African officials have the granting of refugee status to Afrikaners as Coun. The Trump administration has criticized the South African government for having a close relationship with Iran and for its strong position against Israel, including the presentation of a case of genocide in the International Court of Justice on the War in Gaza.

But for many Afrikaners, the descendants of the European colonizers who argued in the country about four centuries, this moment goes beyond politics.

“No white person in their right mind would stay in this country,” said Jaco Van Der Merwe, 52, an Afrikaner who lives in Johannesburg, adding that he and his wife had been victims of violent attacks and went through jobs because White. “I think South Africa is over.”

Mr. Van Der Merwe said he had contacted the United States Embassy in South Africa to ask about the application for refugee status, but that he had not yet received an answer.

The State Department said in March that he had received consultations of more than 8,000 people. It is not clear when the government will admit more.

Much of the discontent between Afrikaners focuses on their experiences in rural communities and tensions about land ownership that remain without their end of apartheid more than 30 years ago.

Many Afrikaners grow to make a living. Apartheid duration, the government denied black South Africans the right to possess main agricultural land. That meean that almost all large -scale commercial farmers in the country were white, and that remains until today.

Althegh, White South Africans represent only 7 percent of the population, have cultivation lands that cover approximately half of the country. That is indicative of a broader prosperity gap, with white South Africans that enjoy much higher employment rates, lower poverty rates and more lucrative wages than their black homologists.

Government’s efforts to redistribute land after apartheid have fallen largely because or factors, including corruption, lack of financial support for black farmers and the inability to obtain enough white South Africans for voluntarily.

This year, the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, signed a measure in the law that gives the government the ability to take private without paying compensation. Althegh’s legal experts say that uncompromising seizures are subject to strict judicial review and that they are probably rare, the leaders of the Afrikaner community have expressed fears that white farmers have their land tasks of them.

There have been no seizures, Trump said, incorrectly, on social networks in February that the South African government was confiscating land.

Zimasa Matiwane contributed reports by Johannesburg, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz From Washington.