Chicago – July 26, 2025
In early July, David Greene, the top U.S. diplomat in South Africa, sent a message to Washington with an important question. He asked if people from other racial groups, like “coloured” South Africans who speak Afrikaans, could apply for a new refugee program. In South Africa, “coloured” refers to people of mixed race, a label that has been used since the country’s apartheid days.
President Donald Trump’s executive order in February seemed to say that the new program was just for white Afrikaners facing unfair treatment because of their race. Afrikaners are a group mostly descended from Dutch settlers, and they often speak Afrikaans.
After Greene’s question, Spencer Chretien, a top U.S. State Department official, emailed back a few days later. He said the program was meant for white people only.
But when reporters asked the State Department about this on July 18, officials gave a different answer. They did not talk about the email or the message from the embassy, but they said the program was actually broader. They pointed to information on their website from May, saying that applicants could be Afrikaners or people from any racial minority in South Africa.
This confusion shows how hard it can be to run a policy for white Afrikaners in a country where many different racial groups, including Afrikaans-speaking mixed-race people and English-speaking whites, live together. The State Department says it will consider both Afrikaners and other minorities, but the emails show that even officials were not sure of the program’s real rules.
