YANKTON, S.D. — Charl Kleinhaus did not like the direction his country was taking.
A white South African, Kleinhaus said the laws meant to empower Black people after the demise of the racist apartheid system had hurt his mining business. Violence in the country — a scourge affecting everyone, regardless of race — had become too much.
So Kleinhaus considered his options.
Some of his fellow Afrikaners, the ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid, had moved to Germany, but the language barrier was not ideal. He thought about Australia.
Then, in February of last year, Kleinhaus received what he described as “a message from above.” President Donald Trump had suspended refugee admissions to the United States, but he made an exception for people like Kleinhaus: white Afrikaners who claim they are victims of racial persecution in South Africa.
“It’s now a reverse apartheid,” Kleinhaus said, summing up his grievances about his homeland. “That’s what we are fighting about now.”
In a matter of months, Kleinhaus secured refugee status and moved with his family to the United States, completing a process that can take years under normal circumstances. Now, after a year in the country, he has settled in South Dakota, where he has found part-time work at a car dealership, a farm and a brickyard while planning his next business.
Kleinhaus is among more than 6,000 South Africans — the vast majority white — who have benefited from Trump’s decision to upend America’s refugee program, which for decades had made the United States a sanctuary for people fleeing disaster and persecution.
Under Trump, the program has effectively become a whites-only path to life in the United States, a culmination of the president’s long-standing antipathy toward immigrants and his embrace of the concept of “reverse racism” as a guiding principle in his administration.
The president has fought to limit immigration for more than a decade, imposing travel bans on mostly African and Muslim-majority nations and making it much more difficult for people from those nations to obtain green cards.
But few of Trump’s efforts are as striking as his efforts to turn the refugee program on its head, leaving thousands of people across the world sitting in refugee camps with no chance of entry into the United States, even as he created a workaround for Afrikaners.
The Trump administration has argued that the overhaul of its refugee program is necessary to prioritize refugees who can better assimilate into the United States.
“President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart.”
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But critics of the policy who are involved in refugee resettlement say the Trump administration’s priorities have made it impossible to help people who have nowhere else to turn.
“It’s the moral and legal inversion of what this work is about,” said Jason Marks, a senior refugee officer who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security last year when Trump announced the effort to fast-track Afrikaners to the United States. “They are rolling out the red carpet for this group with a clear racial and political agenda at the expense of everyone else.”
Kleinhaus acknowledges that moving to the United States from South Africa’s Mpumalanga province was not his “last option.” He left behind a Jaguar sports car, a Range Rover and what he estimates is property worth at least $300,000. He plans to sell them all to bring in extra money.
But he also says many of his white relatives and friends were no longer safe in South Africa.
White farmers have indeed been killed in vicious acts of violence in a country that suffers from a high murder rate. But so have Black South Africans and others, and police data does not support the idea that white South Africans are more likely to be targeted than any other group.
Kleinhaus also said his profits were suffering because of racial equity laws.
“You’re not going to get a big contract from a mining company if you’re not Black,” he said. “There’s too many people. How do you divide a small cake between such a big population?”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers this month that “it is in our national interest” to allow in people who can “quickly assimilate into society and be successful.”
Some of the Afrikaners, who are the descendants of Dutch and other European settlers, have not acclimated as smoothly as the administration expected.
During their initial months in the United States, refugees typically can receive some money for housing and food from resettlement organizations who receive federal funding. Those organizations can also help them find work.
But refugees are expected to eventually be self-sufficient. The process is often a difficult one.
Multiple Afrikaners reported delays in receiving financial support from their local resettlement agency, according to complaints obtained by The New York Times. (The names of many of the refugees were omitted from the documents.) One of the families complained about needing to complete Medicaid and social security applications on their own. That same family griped about needing to use public transportation, according to the documents.
The complaints by the Afrikaners about their level of assistance came after the Trump administration made cuts to funding for resettlement agencies and benefits that in the past were made available to new refugees, including food stamps.
At least three Afrikaners made the return after being settled in states including Minnesota, Idaho and Illinois, according to government documents. Some had sick relatives back home. One Afrikaner said the process had “occurred quickly” and “she had not thoroughly thought through the process.”
“I think some of them are finding that actually it’s not an easy life to be a refugee,” said Bryony Fox, a lecturer at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, who researches forced displacement.
South African officials strongly dispute claims by Trump that Afrikaners are being targeted in a “genocide.”
During apartheid, which ended in 1994, the government denied Black South Africans the right to own prime agricultural land. That meant that almost all of the country’s large-scale commercial farmers were white, and that remains so to this day.
South Africa’s Commission for Employment Equity found that white people made up 61% of top management posts in 2024, while they are only 7.5% of the population. Black South Africans are also unemployed at far higher rates than their white peers, a disparity that has not improved over time.
To address the disparities, the African National Congress government has instituted racial equity laws that incentivize companies to have Black ownership and leadership. That Black Economic Empowerment initiative has prompted intense scrutiny from the Trump administration, as well as from Afrikaners fleeing to the United States who say it has harmed their businesses.
Kleinhaus said such policies make him as a white man feel targeted by the South African government. He said that he had struggled to keep thieves off his property and that his relatives had been the victims of violence.
Fox said there was no denying the violence in South Africa.
“That is our biggest problem,” she said. “But it is not targeted. It is not systematic targeting.”
She said criminals had attacked farms because they “have resources that communities are seeking.”
Trump has echoed fringe claims about a white genocide in South Africa for years, going back to his first term. Last year, in a stunning confrontation in the Oval Office, Trump lectured the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, about his own country. Ramaphosa implored Trump to listen to “the voices of South Africans.”
The State Department does not break down its refugee data by race, but it has allowed in more than 6,600 refugees this fiscal year. All but three were from South Africa.