I arrived in America on Feb. 9, 2011, with just one carry-on bag containing everything to my name: middle school certificates, some clothes and one white bag bearing the International Organization for Migration logo, holding a big badge with my name and our destination: Twin Falls, Idaho.
My one-and-a-half-year-old nephew screamed from hunger. My sister-in-law, drained from days of travel and weakened by her own hunger, tried to breastfeed him as we waited for hours at JFK International Airport.
We had no money and no guide. And I, then just a teenager, was the only one who could speak even a few words of English.
Two days later, after a 10-hour delay in Detroit, we finally landed in Idaho. There was no press conference. No welcome speech. No camera crew. Just one driver from the local refugee center and a Nepali interpreter who took us to a run-down two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of town.
Our new home was in a complex full of people like us — Black, Middle Eastern and other non-white families whose stories no one had ever asked to hear.
That’s what most refugee arrivals in America look like: quiet, tense, invisible. You’re met not with celebration but with suspicion — from airport security, border officials, even bystanders.
Staff roll their eyes when you ask where to go, what time your flight boards, or which gate to use. Strangers glare at you for your accent, your United Nations badge and the smell of exhaustion on your clothes.
There is no dignity — just the constant fear of doing something wrong, of being reminded that you don’t belong. I remember my mother crying softly in a corner, whispering to me: “Let’s go back to the refugee camp, we at least had dignity in camp.”
On Jan. 20, the Trump administration effectively halted refugee admissions. But on May 8, it was announced that refugee status has been granted to 54 White Afrikaners.
On May 12, the same day the Afrikaners arrived in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of temporary protected status for Afghanistan, stripping protections from more than 9,000 Afghans who had risked their lives working alongside U.S. forces.
A senior official from the Department of State made a public speech welcoming to the U.S. the descendants of the people who colonized southern Africa. There was laughter, applause, and praise of just “how well-behaved the children are.” The official even praised their “culture,” a culture that, until the 1990s, upheld an apartheid government.
It wasn’t a refugee arrival. It was a spectacle — a carefully staged, Hollywood-style production of resettlement.
Meanwhile, thousands of other refugees, mostly from the Global South, whose cases had been approved after years of rigorous vetting, have been quietly denied entry or had their resettlement canceled, leaving them in danger and legal limbo.
On May 21, what was supposed to be a bilateral trade meeting at the White House with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and his delegation quickly turned into a political ambush.
Instead of engaging in serious dialogue about economic cooperation or South Africa’s urgent domestic challenges, Trump used the moment to double down on discredited claims of “white genocide” in South Africa. He dismissed Ramaphosa’s explanations and showed no interest in the country’s post-apartheid governance or the crime and inequality affecting both Black and white South Africans.
It was never about addressing the crime rate, addressing poverty or protecting South Africans. It was a calculated performance, meant to reinforce a message to Trump’s political base that, in a multiracial democracy, white people are the ones under threat.
This performance on the global stage was neither about refugee protection nor principled refugee resettlement. It was about stoking fear and legitimizing a MAGA worldview that sees diversity as a threat.
The resettlement of the Afrikaners broke decades of precedent outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act, which together call for a fair admission with rigorous proof of political persecution. It’s far from the standards many families like mine were held to.
I’ve worked with thousands of refugees across the country, from Pennsylvania to Idaho, Utah and Ohio. As the founder of Refugee Civic Action, I spend every day helping newly arrived and naturalized Americans understand the rights, responsibilities and values of this country, believing that they, too, can become active participants in our democracy. In the last election alone, Refugee Civic Action engaged more than 27,000 former refugees who were new American voters.
In recent days, I have been thinking about the Afghan father I mentored, who risked his life to support U.S. forces, who was forced to flee alone, leaving behind his two young sons in Taliban-controlled Kabul, and the mother I met through a refugee organization, who had fled China in fear for her daughter’s life in Xinjiang, only to have their family reunification indefinitely stalled under this administration’s policies.
Historically, the U.S. has welcomed refugees for two primary reasons. One is geopolitical: during the Cold War, admission of those fleeing communism allowed America to assert itself as a beacon of democracy, and it took pride in that.
My family benefited from the other, more enduring motivation: the humanitarian imperative to protect the persecuted. In 2008, the U.S. extended refuge to Bhutanese families like mine, offering a pathway to resettlement and safety.
At its best, the refugee program reflects America’s highest ideals. But this admission of white Afrikaners has nothing to do with either. This is about racial signaling.
What we have seen in the case of the Afrikaners is a strategic, racialized provocation that twists the legal and moral foundations of refugee protections to serve a white nationalist agenda.
The Afrikaners, by contrast, were ushered in — some in just three months — under the unfounded claim that they were victims of “racial persecution.” This move is not merely a policy decision; it is a politically calculated act that aligns with the rhetoric of the Make America Great Again movement.
First, it reinforces the narrative that white individuals are the true victims of globalization and competitive multiracial democracy. Second, it breathes new life into the “great replacement” theory: the racist and unfounded belief that white Americans are being systematically replaced by rising nonwhite populations.
By admitting white South Africans as refugees and victims of racial persecution, the Trump administration has sent a dangerous message that in a multiracial democracy, the loss of white dominance is equivalent to persecution — a narrative that has been actively promoted in public discourse by a fringe group of MAGA movements.
In this narrative, South Africa becomes a warning of what awaits the United States should Black and nonwhite Americans gain political power, even though white South Africans still control a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth, including an estimated 73 percent of private farmland. As America becomes a more diverse nation, those who equate whiteness with greatness see this shift not as progress, but as a threat.
Congress must demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. On what grounds were white Afrikaners granted expedited status while thousands of others, many with proven claims of persecution, wait in limbo or are deported?
Answering this question is not only essential to protect the integrity of the refugee system, but also to preserve the very foundation of a multiracial democracy.
Lok Darjee is a former Bhutanese refugee from Nepal and the founder of Refugee Civic Action, a nonpartisan initiative mobilizing New Americans to participate in U.S. democracy. He is a freelance writer and commentator on democracy, immigration, refugee issues and foreign policy.
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