The United States government has invoked an emergency order to expand its refugee admissions programme — and the primary beneficiaries are white Afrikaner South Africans. Washington cited an "unforeseen emergency" in South Africa to justify the move, raising the annual cap on refugee entries for the group while people fleeing active war zones in other parts of the world continue to be turned away. The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that white farmers in South Africa are victims of a racially motivated genocide. Pretoria flatly rejects this.

Experts who have examined the data say there is no statistical evidence of elevated violence targeting white farmers as a group. Oscar van Heerden, a research fellow at the Centre for African Diplomacy and Leadership at the University of Johannesburg, argues that the policy is built on a deliberate distortion. "He has this twisted notion in his head that he will convince the world that, after the Mandela years, we no longer have any moral authority in the world," van Heerden told DW. That loss of moral authority is precisely the point, he suggests.

Since late 2023, South Africa has been one of Israel's fiercest critics, filing a genocide lawsuit against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague — a case that could take years to resolve. Van Heerden believes Trump's refugee order is designed to frame South Africa as a human-rights violator, effectively neutralising Pretoria's standing to prosecute that case. The result is a refugee system that experts say no longer pretends to be colour-blind. People escaping verified atrocities — in Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere — wait in limbo, while a politically convenient group moves to the front of the queue.