Washington DC [US], May 13 : A group of 59 White South Africans arrived in the United States on Monday after being granted refugee status under the US President Donald Trump administration, marking the first such designation by the administration, according to a report by CNN.
The group, which included children, landed at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where they were welcomed by US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Troy Edgar.
The Trump administration has moved to not only admit but to expedite the processing of Afrikaners as refugees for alleged discrimination. At the same time, it has suspended all other refugee resettlement, including for people fleeing war and famine, as per CNN.
Defending his administration's decision to grant refugee status to a group of White South Africans, Trump on Monday described the situation in South Africa as "a genocide," citing the killing of white farmers and the confiscation of their land. Trump said the US had extended protection to those fleeing what he called a "terrible situation," and criticised the media for ignoring the issue.
During a press conference, Trump said, "They are being killed and we don't want to see people be killed... It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about, it's a terrible thing that's taking place, and farmers are being killed; they happen to be white. Whether they're white white or black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa, and the newspapers and the television media don't even talk about... I don't care who they are, I don't care about their race, their colour, I don't care about their height, their weight, I don't care about anything. I just know that what's happening is terrible. I have people who live in South Africa they say it's a terrible situation taking place, so we have essentially extended citizenship to those people to escape from that violence and come here."
Earlier on Monday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that those going to the US "do not fit the definition of a refugee."
Ramaphosa said he told Donald Trump that what the US president had been told about the persecution of the White minority group was not true. "Those people who have fled are not being persecuted, they are not being hounded, they are not being treated badly. They are leaving ostensibly because they don't want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country in accordance with our constitution," he said at a panel at the Africa CEO Forum in Cote d'Ivoire, CNN reported.
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