President Donald Trump on Monday claimed the White South Africans his administration has welcomed into the country were fleeing from genocide.
The day before, The New York Times reported that a charter plane carrying dozens of South Africans was headed to the U.S. from Johannesburg. The families onboard the U.S.-funded flight said they were the victims of discrimination on the basis of their race, and Trump has expedited the process to grant them refugee status in the country.
In the report, they claimed they had been passed over for jobs and even violently attacked because they’re White. Trump first signed an executive order in February to give refugee status to the fleeing Afrikaners.
While taking questions in the White House on Monday following his speech on drug prices, Trump was asked why he expedited South African immigration while halting immigration in other countries plagued by conflict. In his response, he baselessly claimed that there was an ongoing genocide in their country.
“Because they’re being killed, and we don’t want to see people be killed,” Trump said. “Now, South Africa leadership is coming to see me — I understand sometime next week — and we’re supposed to have a, I guess, a G20 meeting there or something; but we’re having a G20 meeting. I don’t know how we can go unless that situation’s taken care of. But it’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about, but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place.
“Farmers are being killed. They happen to be White. But whether they’re white or Black, makes no difference to me; but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa, and the newspapers and the media, television media doesn’t even talk about it. If it were the other way around, they talk about it. That would be the only story they talk about. I don’t care who they are. I don’t care about their race, their color, I don’t care about their height, their weight. I don’t care about anything. I just know that what’s happening is terrible. I have people that live in South Africa. They say it’s a terrible situation taking place, so we’ve essentially extended citizenship to those people and to escape from that violence and come here.”
South Africa’s government recently signed into law a bill that would give it authority to seize private property without compensation. The measure was introduced in response to Afrikaners — who own roughly half the country’s farmland while making up 7% of the population — refusing to sell their land amid the country’s efforts to redistribute it more evenly with its Black population. At the time of writing, however, no land had actually been seized by the government.
