The Trump administration welcomed on Monday 59 white South Africans it granted refugee status in the US, having deemed them victims of racial discrimination, while drawing criticism from Democrats and stirring confusion in South Africa.
US President Donald Trump has blocked mostly non-white refugee admissions from the rest of the world, but in February offered to resettle Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch settlers, saying they faced discrimination.
Asked on Monday why white South Africans were being prioritised above the victims of famine and war elsewhere in Africa, Trump said, without providing evidence, that Afrikaners were being killed.
“It's a genocide that's taking place," Trump told reporters at the White House, going further than he has previously in echoing right-wing tropes about their alleged persecution.
He was not favouring Afrikaners because they are white, Trump said, adding that their race "makes no difference to me."
South Africa maintains there is no evidence of persecution and that claims of a "white genocide" in the country, echoed by Trump's white South African-born ally Elon Musk, have not been backed up by evidence.
The Episcopal Church announced on Monday that it would no longer work with the federal government on refugees after it was asked to help settle the Afrikaners.
"It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years," Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe wrote in a letter to the church's followers.
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the most senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the move "baffling."
"The decision by this administration to put one group at the front of the line is clearly politically motivated and an effort to rewrite history," she said in a statement on Monday.
US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted the first 59 Afrikaners to arrive in a hangar at Washington's Dulles airport. He compared their journey to that of his own father, a Jew from Austria who fled Europe in the 1930s, first to South America and then to the United States.
Landau did not repeat Trump's claims of killings, but said many of the South Africans were farming families who had worked land for generations but now faced the threat of that land being expropriated, as well as threats of violence.
Trump's February order on resettling Afrikaners cited a land law introduced by South Africa this year that aims to make it easier for the state to expropriate land in the public interest, which has caused concern among some white South Africans although no land has been seized.
Charl Kleinhaus, 46, who arrived on Monday and was set to be resettled in Buffalo, New York, with his daughter, son and grandson, said his life was threatened and people tried to claim his property as their own. Reuters was unable to verify his account.
"We never expected this land expropriation thing to go so far," he told Reuters.
Some of the Afrikaners were heading to Democratic-leaning Minnesota, which has a reputation for welcoming refugees, while others planned to go to Republican-led states such as Idaho and Alabama, sources told Reuters.
The US would welcome more Afrikaner refugees in the coming months, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
'Wrong end of the stick?'
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has cut all US financial assistance to South Africa, citing disapproval of its land policy and of its genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Washington's ally Israel.
Speaking at a conference in Ivory Coast, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the white Afrikaners had ostensibly left because they were opposed to policies aimed at addressing racial inequality persisting since apartheid, or white minority rule, ended three decades ago.
"We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we'll continue talking to them," he said.
Trump said that South Africa's leadership was traveling to see him next week and that he would not travel to a G20 meeting there in November unless the "situation is taken care of."
Since Nelson Mandela won South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, the once-ruling white minority has retained most of its wealth amassed since colonial times.
Whites still own three-quarters of private land and have about 20 times the wealth of the Black majority, according to international academic journal the Review of Political Economy.
Less than 10 percent of white South Africans are out of work, compared with more than a third of their Black counterparts.
