DULLES, Virginia: The Trump administration on Monday welcomed a group of 59 white South Africans as refugees, saying they face discrimination and violence at home, which the country\u2019s government strongly denies.<\/p>\n
The decision to admit the Afrikaners also has raised questions from refugee advocates about why they were admitted when the Trump administration has suspended efforts to resettle people fleeing war and persecution who have gone through years of vetting.<\/p>\n
Many in the group from South Africa \u2014 including toddlers and other small children, even one walking barefoot in pajamas \u2014 held small American flags as two officials welcomed them to the United States in an airport hangar outside Washington. The South Africans were then leaving on other flights to various US destinations.<\/p>\n
A group of 49 Afrikaners had been expected, but the State Department said Monday that 59 had arrived.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want you all to know that you are really welcome here and that we respect what you have had to deal with these last few years,\u201d Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump told reporters earlier Monday that he\u2019s admitting them as refugees because of the \u201cgenocide that\u2019s taking place.\u201d He said that in post-apartheid South Africa, white farmers are \u201cbeing killed\u201d and he plans to address the issue with South African leadership next week.<\/p>\n
That characterization has been strongly disputed by South Africa\u2019s government, experts and even the Afrikaner group AfriForum, which says farm attacks are not being taken seriously by the government.<\/p>\n
South Africa\u2019s government says the US allegations that the white minority Afrikaners are being persecuted are \u201ccompletely false,\u201d the result of misinformation and an inaccurate view of the country. It cited the fact that Afrikaners are among the richest and most successful people in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DULLES, Virginia: The Trump administration on Monday welcomed a group of 59 white South Africans as refugees, saying they face discrimination and violence at home, which the country\u2019s government strongly denies. The decision to admit the Afrikaners also has raised questions from refugee advocates about why they were admitted when the Trump administration has suspended …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":80931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80932,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80903\/revisions\/80932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}