The Trump administration plans to cut refugee admissions to 7,500 in 2026 and concentrate most of those slots on Afrikaners from South Africa and other people it says have faced illegal or unjust discrimination, according to a notice cited by DW on the event date.
The move marks a dramatic reduction from the ceiling under President Joe Biden, whose administration had admitted 125,000 refugees annually from around the world. The new cap appears in a notice published in the US Federal Register and reflects the president’s authority to set the refugee admissions ceiling.
According to the packet, the administration said admissions numbers would primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa and other victims of unjust discrimination in their homelands. The notice did not identify the origin countries of those other applicants. DW reported that after taking office in January, Trump had effectively halted refugee arrivals except for white South Africans.
The decision has already triggered criticism from refugee advocates and human rights groups, who argue that it turns a humanitarian programme into a political one. Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, said the administration was privileging one group while continuing to bar thousands of refugees who had already been vetted and approved. Human Rights First called the move a new low point in US foreign policy, while Global Refuge warned that concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the purpose and credibility of the programme.
The White House’s framing follows Trump’s long-standing claim that Afrikaners face racial persecution in South Africa, a claim the South African government denies. The packet also notes that the refugee programme has existed since 1980 and that Trump lowered the cap each year during his first term until it reached 15,000 in the final year.
The policy shift is significant not only for who may enter the United States, but for what the refugee system is meant to do. Critics say the new approach narrows a long-running international protection programme into a much smaller and more selective pipeline, with the bulk of admissions reserved for a single group and little clarity about others who may qualify.
For now, the only certainty is the scale of the cut. A programme that once admitted 125,000 people a year would, under the new plan, shrink to 7,500 in 2026, with the administration signalling that Afrikaners and other victims of discrimination will dominate that reduced total.
