President Donald Trump’s overhaul of US refugee policies has created a major shift in the number and nationalities of humans admitted to the country, US government data shows.

Since October 2025, 4,499 refugees were resettled in the US, according to the Refugee Processing Center. All, except three from Afghanistan, were South African.

In the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration, which started in October 2023, 125,000 citizens were accepted from 85 countries.

Last year, Trump halted all refugee admissions, including for applicants from warzones, but allowed Afrikaners, a white minority group he remarked was persecuted, to seek resettlement. South Africa objected to his characterisation.

In announcing the change, Trump remarked it would help strengthen national security and public safety.

Priority was to be given to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”, according to an announcement.

The president “has explained why we are resettling Afrikaner refugees in the United States”, a state department spokesperson told the BBC when asked about the latest resettlement figures.

“The US position on this humanitarian initiative has not changed.”

Diplomatic tensions between Washington and Pretoria have been rising since Trump returned to the White House.

Just over a year ago, South Africa’s ambassador in the US, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after accusing Trump of “mobilising a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle”.

Then, in the Oval Office in May, Trump confronted his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, where he claimed that white farmers in South Africa were targets of persecution and “genocide”.

Ramaphosa tried to refute Trump’s assertions and was backed up by John Steenhuisen, the white leader of the Democratic Alliance, which is part of the coalition government.

“Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and construct it work,” Steenhuisen told Trump. This also touches on aspects of geopolitics.

In October, the South African government criticised the US decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide have been widely discredited and lacked reliable evidence.

It highlighted an open letter published by prominent members of the Afrikaner community – including academics, businesspeople and descendants of apartheid-era figures – who rejected the narrative, with some signatories calling the relocation scheme racist.

The first group of 68 South African refugees reached the US in May last year. The numbers began ticking up this year, with 2,848 citizens arriving across February and March.

They have resettled across the US, with the highest concentration – 543 – living in Texas.

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Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

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