President Trump has announced that the U.S. is admitting 10,000 additional white South Africans as refugees, citing persecution in their home country. This decision comes as the administration blocks refugees from other countries. Trump suspended the refugee program on his first day in office and has agreed only to allow in Afrikaners, a group of white South Africans. Advocates say this focus leaves others fleeing war with few options. The South African government calls the claims of discrimination baseless. The State Department has approved more than 6,000 refugees through the program since October, overwhelmingly from South Africa. Resettlement groups are suing to allow stranded refugees to come to the U.S.

The Trump administration is restricting the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States to 7,500 and they'll be mostly white South Africans. It's a dramatic drop after the U.S. previously allowed in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution from around the world. The administration published the news in a notice on the Federal Register on Thursday. No reason was given for the numbers, which are a dramatic decrease from last year's ceiling of 125,000 set under the Biden administration. The memo stated that the admission of the 7,500 refugees during the 2026 budget year is "justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest."

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says the claim that white people are being persecuted in his country is a "completely false narrative." It's his latest attempt to push back against allegations made by U.S. President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and some white minority groups in South Africa. South African-born Musk repeated a claim this weekend in a social media post that some of the country's political figures are "actively promoting white genocide." Ramaphosa said Monday "we should challenge the completely false narrative that our country is a place in which people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution."