President Trump announced Friday that “any farmer” fleeing South Africa can come to America and receive a “rapid pathway” to citizenship.
“South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country,” the president, 78, explained on Truth Social. “They are confiscating their LAND and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding.”
On Feb. 7, Trump signed an executive order ending foreign aid to the African nation in response to a law passed last year allowing the majority black government to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation,” in the words of the White House.
The Expropriation Act of 2024 is intended to undo the consequences of apartheid and allows the government to redistribute land.
“To go a step further,” Trump added Friday, “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!”
Trump’s right-hand man and Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, lived there for the first 18 years of his life, and has frequently posted on X expressing his frustration with the government.
“Starlink is not allowed to operate in South Africa, because I’m not black,” Musk wrote earlier Friday.
On Tuesday, the billionaire wrote: “I grew up as English South African, not Afrikaans, and consider myself to be simply an American. No hyphen. That said, what’s happening in South Africa is deeply wrong. Not what [late former President Nelson] Mandela intended at all.”
Trump’s February executive order also criticized South Africa for siding with Hamas over Israel in the ongoing Middle East conflict.
“South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements,” the document read.
The US gave South Africa more than $320 million in fiscal year 2024, mostly for health and humanitarian aid.
