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The Trump administration is restricting the number of refugees it admits annually to 7,500and giving priority to white South Africans, a dramatic drop after the United States previously allowed in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution from around the world.
The Republican administration published the news on Thursday in a notice on the Federal Registry.
No reason was given for the numbers, which are a dramatic decrease from last year’s ceiling of 125,000 set under Democratic President Joe Biden.
The memo said only that the admission of the 7,500 refugees during 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
The slashed cap represents another blow for the long-standing programme that until recently has enjoyed bipartisan support.
Trump suspended the programme on his first day in office and since then only a trickle of refugees have entered the country, mostly white South Africans.
Some refugees have also been admitted as part of a court case seeking to allow entry to refugees who were overseas and in the process of coming to the US when the scheme was suspended.
The administration announced the programme for Afrikaners in February, saying that white South African farmers face discrimination and violence at home.
The country’s government strongly denied that characterisation.
“We reiterate that allegations of discrimination are unfounded,” the Ministry of Interior Relations said in May.
“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.”
Refugee organisations denounce cuts
Refugee advocacy groups have reacted strongly to the Trump administration’s new limit on entries.
“By privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicising a humanitarian programme,” Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Programme (IRAP), said in a statement.
“Concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President & CEO of Global Refuge.
Human Rights First condemned the decision as a “new low point” in US foreign policy.
“This decision will further destabilise front-line states that host over two-thirds of the world’s nearly 43 million refugees, undermining US national security in tandem,” said Uzra Zeya, president of Human Rights First.
In May, a group of 49 white South Africans became the first beneficiaries of a controversial US refugee programme.
The Afrikaners, who included families with small children, left South Africa on a chartered plane bound for the US, a spokesperson for the South African transport ministry confirmed.
The Trump administration upended US refugee admissions policy, with the result that virtually all people fleeing famine and war in countries such as Sudan no longer have a chance of resettlement there.
However, it has made an exception for Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that created and implemented South Africa’s brutal apartheid system, which lasted from the late 1940s until the early 1990s.
Additional sources • AP