America is now a whites-only refuge

If you are seeking to be admitted as a refugee in the United States, the Trump administration has made it explicit: you will be judged by the color of your skin.

Since October 2025, a total of 6,688 people have been accepted as refugees by the U.S. government; 6,685 of them have been white. Under a new admissions program exclusively for white South Africans, it is not even necessary to show that one has been a victim — of anything. For this privileged class, to "be able to articulate" a "fear of future persecution" is more than sufficient. That's a significant departure from the requirement that said fear be "well-founded" and have "an objective basis," which the Department of Homeland Security still teaches as the standard for everyone else.

You also get handouts from the government, if you're white, including a tablet computer and a book that argues South Africa's present, democratically elected government has made "race relations even worse" than the glory days of apartheid. All this — the red carpet and tote bag — even as South Africa's whites are better off, financially, and far less likely to be victims of violent crime than their Black neighbors.

It's not really about facts, though, is it? By any objective measure, people from Haiti are far more deserving of refugee status than some Afrikaner. The United Nations Refugee Agency has urged governments around the world to grant asylum to Haitians and halt the deportations, having noted that their home country faces its "worst human rights and humanitarian situation in decades." But it's members of that disfavored group — some 350,000 people already settled in the United States — who are losing their legal status and facing imminent removal.

The hypocrisy of America's whites-only admissions policy is a demonstration of power, if nothing else.

After the Supreme Court's right-wing majority granted the Trump administration the right to make Haitians with legal status "illegal" overnight, Stephen Miller, one of the president's top advisers, announced that "America's doors are closed, fully, to asylum seekers."

Speaking to reporters, Miller — who has described white South Africans as fitting "the textbook definition" of refugees — insisted that no one in the Western Hemisphere, Haitian or otherwise, could legitimately claim to be fleeing persecution.

"All asylum claims across the southwest border are always fake," he said, denying that anyone in the Americas is ever targeted based on race, religion, politics or their membership in a targeted group. "In every case, they're either criminals, benefit seekers, economic migrants, welfare seekers, etc. They're coming to join family members and so forth."

As for the threat of violence? Fake, across the board. "There's pockets of Chicago with crime rates just as high as [Haiti]," he insisted.

In a different context, it is not hard to imagine Miller arguing that America's major cities are unsafe for white people, too. Unlike Haitians, however, Afrikaners are granted refugee status; they are not told that bad things could happen anywhere.

That this is the "textbook definition" of white supremacy — legal status and swag if you are white; chained to your seat on a deportation flight if you are not — is both obvious and, somehow, contentious. Trump and his allies do not hide their racist venom but lean into it; the president of the United States, perhaps bored with the attacks on Haitians, has recently moved on to calling people of Somali heritage "garbage" who "contribute nothing."

"Their country's no good for a reason," he said. For 80,000 Somali-Americans, that country — the one they were born in — is the United States. But like legal status for Haitians, that too is seen as nothing more than an inconvenience (as Miller told the press: "one way or another, this nation has to end birthright citizenship").

What is it like, white Americans can only wonder, for the most powerful man in the country to declare you subhuman filth? Trump supporters lost their minds at the suggestion that some of them held "deplorable" views. And to this day, it seems as if many are afraid to say that overt racism of the sort displayed by this president and embraced by his followers is not the product of legitimate grievances but of tiny hearts, small minds and ugly souls.

How many lives will now be uprooted, trauma inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people who already call America home, so that the white racist — the president, his top adviser, the base of his support — can derive pleasure from brutality? Mothers' tears will be shed, children separated from the schools, churches and friends they have now known for most of their lives, not because circumstances demanded it, but owing to a fully man-made disaster, all to generate content for some bigot's phone.

There is much about today's United States that should frighten and outrage those who still believe in the dignity, rights and equal value of every human being. Some comfort may be taken in the pendulum swinging the other way; it usually does. But the avoidable, pathetic cruelty of it all: that's something my fellow Americans will need to grapple with for decades to come, and which hundreds of thousands of others, who once called America home, will not soon forget.