“Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer,” sang South Africa’s black nationalist and communist-inspired politician Julius Malema to an estimated 90,000 followers at a July 2023 rally before vocalizing a crude onomatopoeia of automatic weapons fire. The song, which contains dozens of rhythmic repetitions of the word “kill,” is rooted in the African National Congress’s campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime, which ended in 1994. It has also been sung in public by former South African president Jacob Zuma.

Current president Cyril Ramaphosa, who has been in office since 2018, has yet to condemn the song, and in January signed into law an expropriation act that allows his government to confiscate largely white-owned farmland without compensation for reasons of “public interest,” which can include cases intended “to redress the results of past racial discriminatory laws or practices.”

One could describe the new law, which adds to an estimated 141 other South African laws imposing discriminatory anti-white policies, as DEI in action. But white South Africans, like the 59 Afrikaner refugees who arrived at Washington’s Dulles airport on Monday, might reasonably be forgiven for thinking that Malema—who leads the Economic Freedom Fighters, one of South Africa’s major political parties—wants them dead and that their government will look the other way from his murderous intent while facilitating their persecution.

In case there were any doubt, Malema less than reassuringly told a television interviewer that he had not directly called for the deaths of white people, “at least for now,” and refused to disavow making such a declaration in the future, suggesting that it would depend on what discredited former Ivy League university presidents might call “context.” Ramaphosa and his government, who deny that the new arrivals are “refugees,” have called talk of genocide “completely false” and insist that anti-white discrimination does not exist in South Africa in any form. They and their apologists at home and abroad often try to bury unflattering evidence to the contrary, such as South Africa’s record-high rate of violent crime—which is among the world’s worst—and blame the situation on “historic injustice.”

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who met the new arrivals along with Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Troy Edgar, said that they had shared with him “harrowing stories of the violence that they faced in South Africa.” An internal State Department memorandum reported by the Washington Post stated that the refugees had “witnessed or experienced extreme violence with a racial nexus,” including home invasions, murders, and carjackings. One of the refugees had reportedly been attacked four times, the final occasion occurring the day before leaving for her meeting with U.S. officials. According to AfriForum, an advocacy organization that represents white South Africans, about 50 white farmers are murdered by black assailants every year—or about one per week—amid hundreds of violent attacks involving assault, rape, robbery, arson, destruction of property, and other crimes that are often accompanied by racist slogans and rhetoric about land repossession. The police allegedly deprioritize these incidents compared to other crimes, possibly on racial grounds.

President Trump has been concerned about the issue since at least August 2018, when he instructed then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” Australia also examined the issue with the intent to open an easier path of immigration for white South Africans. On Feb. 7, in direct response to the expropriation law, Trump signed an executive order ending all U.S. foreign aid to South Africa and providing for Afrikaner resettlement in the United States to escape racial discrimination. Trump’s adviser Elon Musk, who hails from South Africa, has posted about a “genocide of white people” in the land of his birth and denounced its “racist ownership laws.” On Monday, Trump described the plight of the Afrikaners to White House journalists as “genocide.”

Bringing in the Afrikaner refugees appeared to clash with Trump’s earlier executive order freezing most refugee-based migration. That order cited America’s inability to absorb large numbers of new arrivals after the flood of illegal immigrants under the Biden administration. Trump’s order, however, allowed exceptions for “refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States and to ensure that the United States preserves taxpayer resources for its citizens.” The individual stories of the 59 Afrikaner refugees have not been disclosed, but Landau remarked in a video of their welcoming ceremony that many are farming families with children. In sharp contrast to images of the many illegal immigrants who have been apprehended and returned to their home countries since January, the South African arrivals appear to be polite, respectful, and grateful to be welcomed to their new country, whose flag many were holding.

Meanwhile the radical left, which largely controls the humanitarian relief industry, is outraged.

Protestors from multiple organizations assembled outside Dulles airport denouncing both the Trump administration’s fast-track policy and the refugees themselves. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who went to great efforts to “comfort” alleged MS-13 gang member and El Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Abrego Garcia—now in prison in his home country—posted that the Afrikaner migrants “do not need” their refugee status and denounced Trump’s decision to help them as a “sick global apartheid policy.”

The Episcopal Church, citing its supposedly “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation,” not only refused a federal request to resettle the new arrivals but announced that it will terminate its decades-long cooperation with the federal government at the end of the fiscal year, purportedly finding the arrival of a few dozen Afrikaners so “painful” that it simply cannot continue.  Let us recall that the day after Trump’s inauguration, this same denomination’s bishop of Washington abused her presiding role at the Service of Prayer for the Nation to admonish the returning president to show “mercy” to migrants—presumably as long as they are not too white.