July 27, 2025
Top U.S. diplomat in South Africa asked Trump officials if repatriation program included non-white applicants.
Earlier in July, the top U.S. Embassy official in South Africa reached out to Trump administration officials to find out whether the controversial repatriation program, which so far has been used only by white South Africans, was also open to non-white applicants who met the eligibility criteria. However, despite the official position from the U.S. State Department that it is, a Trump administration official responded to their request by informing the official that the program was intended for whites only.
According to Reuters, the February executive order from Donald Trump that established the program only set forth that it was intended for “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination,” a term is generally used to describe South Africans who are descended from Dutch settlers.
However, when the U.S. Embassy’s Charge d’affaires, David Greene, asked if the program is open to people of mixed race, who are referred to as “colored” in South Africa, Spencer Chretien, the highest ranking official at the State Department’s refugee and migration bureau, replied in an email that the program is not open to anyone but white South Africans.
When Reuters reached out to the State Department for confirmation on July 18, the department did not specifically address Chretien’s comments but it did indicate that the scope of the policy is wider than he indicated to the U.S. Embassy official, parroting a claim on the state department’s website that applicants for the program “must be of Afrikaner ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in South Africa.”
According to the report, this is the first known account of tensions between the U.S. Embassy and the State Department, highlighting the confusion that can arise when enforcing a racially restrictive policy in a racially diverse country like South Africa, where both mixed-race Afrikaans speakers and white English-speaking South Africans reside.
Despite a campaign promise from Trump to crack down on immigration and a freeze on refugee applications from around the world, Trump also said after retaking the White House that the United States would only accept immigrants who “can fully and appropriately assimilate,” a statement that seems to hint at a discriminatory refugee policy.
In February, Trump issued an executive order that echoed far-right claims that white South Africans have been discriminated against by the Black majority in South Africa. Although these claims have been rejected by the South African government, Trump’s executive order stated that Afrikaners are victims of “violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Officially, the White House, per a statement from a Trump administration official, is sticking with the official line that the policy is not racially restrictive, even though most of the people who have been resettled are white.
“We will prioritize refugee admissions for South African citizens, including Afrikaners and other racial minorities in South Africa, who have been targeted by the discriminatory laws of the South African government,” the White House official told Reuters.
Despite this assertion, as Pauline Bax, the African program deputy director for the International Crisis Group, told News Nation in April, white South Africans are not refugees, despite language in Trump’s order placing them in that category.
“Maybe they will have more economic opportunities than they think they have here in South Africa, but the idea that they will be refugees is completely false. There is no persecution. The fact of the matter is that South Africa had an apartheid system where whites dominated politics, they dominated the economy, and even low-skilled white people, mostly Afrikaans, who didn’t have many prospects, could easily get a state job…It’s just not true,” Bax said.
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