US President Trump Makes False Assertion About White South Africans Fleeing to Australia

Donald Trump has falsely claimed that Australia is being “inundated” with white South Africans fleeing their farms, repeating a baseless conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are being systematically murdered and their land expropriated. Trump held a meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House where he showcased a video he falsely claimed proved “genocide” was being committed against white people in South Africa, describing it as “the opposite of apartheid”. These claims come in spite of murder and violent crime rates in the country being high, but the majority of victims being Black. The former home affairs minister Peter Dutton proposed a special humanitarian intake for white South African farmers in 2018. The dedicated program would have been modelled after the intake for Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Dutton argued in 2018 that white South African farmers “deserve special attention” and “need help from a civilised country like ours”. The South African government has dismissed the allegations of systematic violence against white farmers and the Australian home affairs department did not implement any dedicated program for white South Africans. This year the US has started resettling white South Africans as refugees, with Trump claiming Afrikaners are the victims of “genocide”. The US senator Chris Van Hollen has accused the Trump administration of “making a mockery” of the country’s refugee process, turning it into a system of “global apartheid” by granting asylum status to Afrikaners while turning away refugees from war-torn countries. Ramaphosa has pushed back against Trump’s statements, acknowledging South Africa’s high crime rate but stressing that most victims are Black.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/22/trump-false-claim-australia-white-genocide-south-africa