WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States has resettled 4,499 refugees since October 2025 under President Donald Trump's overhauled refugee admissions policy, with all but three of those admitted being South African nationals, according to the Refugee Processing Center. The remaining three refugees were from Afghanistan.

Trump halted all refugee admissions in 2025, including for applicants from warzones, before restarting the program with a new framework that gave priority to Afrikaners, a white minority group he said were persecuted. An announcement stated that priority for refugee resettlement was to be given to Afrikaner South Africans and "other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands."

A total of 2,848 refugees arrived in the United States in February and March 2026 alone. Of the refugees resettled since October 2025, the largest number — 543 — are living in Texas. In the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration, which began in October 2023, 125,000 refugees were accepted from 85 countries.

A State Department spokesperson defended the policy. "The US position on this humanitarian initiative has not changed," the spokesperson said.

South Africa objected to Trump's characterization of Afrikaners as being persecuted. In October 2025, the South African government stated that claims of a white genocide in South Africa had been widely discredited and lacked reliable evidence. The government also pointed to an open letter from prominent Afrikaner community members — including academics, businesspeople, and descendants of apartheid-era figures — who rejected the white genocide narrative and described the relocation scheme as racist.

In May 2025, Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office and told him that white farmers in South Africa were targets of persecution and genocide. Ramaphosa disputed those assertions. John Steenhuisen told Trump that most of South Africa's commercial and smallholder farmers want to stay in the country and make it work.

South Africa's ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after accusing Trump of mobilizing a supremacism and using a white victimhood narrative as a dog whistle.