BREAKING: Trump’s “persecuted” White South African refugees are heading home — saying life in America is worse.
Donald Trump spent months claiming that white South Africans were victims of persecution and needed refuge in the United States — all while barring refugees from every other country, particularly Muslim and non-white asylum seekers.
Now, many of these Afrikaner “refugees” are packing up and going back.
According to new reporting, some of the very people Trump’s administration welcomed under its controversial refugee program for white South Africans are deciding they’d rather live in South Africa — saying the United States has become too expensive, too chaotic, and too dangerous.
One of them, Andrew Veitch, moved to California in 2003 after being robbed at gunpoint in South Africa. But after two decades in America, he says the situation here feels worse.
“People are being shot in broad daylight,” Veitch said. “American citizens are being shot and killed. I don’t want to live in a place like this.”
Thousands of white South Africans are now exploring a return home. The South African government says about 1,000 people have already reclaimed citizenship under a new program designed to help former citizens come back.
Their reasons? Lower living costs, being closer to family — and growing political turmoil abroad.
In other words, the reality is clashing hard with the narrative.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly pushed the conspiracy theory that white South Africans are victims of a so-called “white genocide.” But South African officials say there is no evidence of systematic persecution against white citizens, and crime statistics show violence affects people of all races — often hitting Black South Africans even harder.
Even so, the Trump administration launched a refugee resettlement program heavily focused on Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers.
But now the irony is becoming impossible to ignore.
The same country Trump portrayed as a safe haven for supposedly persecuted white South Africans is, for some of them, simply not worth staying in.
When the people your policy was supposedly rescuing decide they’d rather go back where they came from, it raises a pretty uncomfortable question: Was the crisis ever real in the first place — or was it just another political talking point? We’re pretty sure it’s the latter.