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Asked by a reporter why he was welcoming white South Africans to the U.S. as refugees, President Donald Trump said there was “a genocide that’s taking place” against white farmers in the country. Experts say the president is misapplying that term.
“Because they’re being killed and we don’t want to see people be killed,” Trump also said at the May 12 press conference.
There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed or violently attacked, experts told us. But most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid are still owned by a relatively small white minority.
“Yes, white farmers are being killed in South Africa,” political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation in Paris, told us via email. “However, there is nothing like a ‘white genocide.’ And the issue needs to be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity.”
Although police statistics are imprecise on the issue, there have been about 50 farm murders per year over the last several years. That’s less than 1% of all murders in the country.
“Murder victimization is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race,” Lizette Lancaster, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us via email.
“Farm attacks, including murders, do occur in South Africa, and many are undeniably brutal,” Anthony Kaziboni, a political and critical sociologist at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa, told us via email. “However, South Africa must be understood in its broader socio-economic and historical context.” South Africa has “extreme inequality, with approximately 10% of the population (largely white) owning over 80% of the wealth. It also has a deeply violent past, and the country’s structural violence persists today alongside physical violence, economic violence, and many other forms of violence.”
“Violent crime affects all sectors of society, not just farmers,” Kaziboni said.
Trump’s Refugee Plan
On his first day in office, Trump suspended all refugee admissions to the U.S. until such time as bringing in new refugees “aligns with the interests of the United States.” But on Feb. 7, Trump issued an order making an exception for South Africa’s white minority Afrikaner ethnic group. The order called Afrikaners “victims of unjust racial discrimination” and said “the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
The “property confiscation” part refers to a law signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in January that will allow the government to confiscate land, in some cases without compensation. While “just and equitable” compensation must be paid to owners whose land is confiscated in most cases, under the law, there are limited circumstances under which confiscation could take place without compensation. Those include cases “where the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is not to develop the land or use it to generate income, but to benefit from appreciation of its market value”; when land is not being used “for its core functions”; and “where an owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so.”
Ramaphosa defended the law on X, saying, “South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land. The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”
Part of the aim of the law is to hasten a rebalance of the distribution of land in the country after decades of colonialism and apartheid. The 1913 Natives Land Act , enacted under British rule of South Africa, restricted Black ownership of land and resulted in thousands of Black families being forcibly removed from their land. Although those laws were repealed post-apartheid in 1991, great racial disparity remains in land ownership. According to a 2017 land audit report commissioned by the South African government, white people owned about 72% of the farm and agricultural holdings despite making up about 7% of the population.
In 2021, the South African Human Rights Commission said South Africa’s “gross inequality often leads to racism and racial polarisation.”
Defending the land expropriation policy in an op-ed in the Financial Times in 2018, Ramaphosa wrote: “Among the greatest obstacles to growth is the severe inequality between black and white South Africans. For the South African economy to reach its full potential, it is therefore necessary to significantly narrow gaps in income, skills, assets and opportunities. One of the areas where this disparity is most devastating is in the ownership and access to land. As the World Bank has observed, ‘South Africa’s historical, highly skewed distribution of land and productive assets is a source of inequality and social fragility.’”
On X, Elon Musk, who was raised in South Africa and is a close Trump adviser, condemned the policy as “openly racist ownership laws.” On Truth Social, Trump concurred, saying, “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.”
Trump’s Genocide Claim
On May 12, the first 59 Afrikaner refugees were welcomed into the U.S.
That day, during a press conference on drug prices, a reporter asked Trump why the U.S. had expedited Afrikaner refugee admissions from South Africa, “as you’ve halted virtually all refugee admissions for people fleeing famine and war from countries like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Trump said the Afrikaners were being accepted as refugees “because they’re being killed.” He said the U.S. “essentially extended citizenship to those people to escape from that violence and come here.” He suggested he would not attend an upcoming G20 summit in South Africa “unless that situation’s taken care of.”
“It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” Trump continued. “But it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place. And farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they’re white or Black, it makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa and the newspapers and the media, television media doesn’t even talk about it. If it were the other way around, they’d talk about it. That would be the only story they’d talk about.”
Ramaphosa said that Trump’s assessment of the situation in South Africa is inaccurate.
“A refugee is someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution, or economic persecution,” Ramaphosa said on May 12. “And they don’t fit that bill.”
The claims about a “white genocide” in South Africa have circulated for decades, particularly on far-right sites and social media accounts, and the claims often grossly inflate statistics about farm murders. Trump, himself, has been making claims about the “large scale killing of farmers” at least as far back as 2018.
Definition of Genocide
The United Nations defines genocide as acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
What’s happening in South Africa doesn’t fit that description, experts said.
Lancaster, the project manager of the ISS Crime and Justice Information Hub, which provides data and analysis on crime and public violence in South Africa, said that when considering murder and violence in totality, there is no evidence to suggest white farmers are being singled out.
“From the available evidence, white people are the least at risk of being murdered … with [Black] African people being the most at risk of being murdered,” Lancaster said. “If there was a racial motive for crime and murders in South Africa, then the murder of white people would be higher than their relative percentage of the population. Murder victimization is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race. About 50% of all murders take place in about 12% of [police] precincts, with 20% taking place in less the three per cent or 30 stations. All of these areas are primarily townships or poor areas in metropolitan cities, mostly populated by African people.”
Murders of farmers are far less than 1% of all murders in South Africa, she said.
According to data compiled by the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa, a commercial farmers union made up mostly of Afrikaners, there were 32 farm murders in 2024, down from 50 in 2023 and 43 in 2022. (And a total of just under 2,300 farm murders since 1990.) Most — but not all — of the victims were white. According to data compiled by South Africa police, which do not delineate by race, there were 51 murders on farms in 2022-23, out of a total of nearly 27,500 murders in the country.
According to the U.S. State Department’s most recent report on human rights in South Africa in 2023, “Some advocacy groups asserted white farmers were racially targeted for burglaries, home invasions, and killings, while many observers attributed the incidents to the country’s high and growing crime rate.” Similar language was used in State Department reports during the first Trump administration as well.
In February, a South Africa court said that a “white genocide” was “clearly imagined and not real.”
“White farmers being killed is a fact,” Camus said. “The phenomenon was, until recently, largely ignored by the European media and deserves attention and concern. However, it is used as a political weapon by the Far-Right. Just to make it clear, the South African press does report such attacks, especially the Afrikaans daily Die Burger.”
Lancaster noted that one of the leading causes of murders in South Africa is robbery. That was one of the conclusions of a 2003 government inquiry into farm attacks.
The report found that while farm murders were on the rise at that time, “All the investigating officers are of the opinion that the primary motive for the greater majority of cases – perhaps 90% – is robbery. They are also of the view that farm attacks are not politically motivated and that there is no evidence of an organized structure behind the attacks. There is a perception amongst perpetrators that farmers are wealthy and any business conducted on the farm is a precipitating factor.”
“The isolation of farms makes farmers particularly vulnerable to crime, but this is a function of geography and socio-economic conditions rather than political or racial intent,” Kaziboni of the University of Johannesburg told us.
“Given the UN’s definition, describing farm killings as genocide is a gross mischaracterization,” Kaziboni said “This does not diminish the seriousness of these crimes, nor the need for targeted rural safety interventions. But it is essential to approach such topics with clarity and care, grounded in credible evidence and context.”
Lancaster noted that “one of the things that is typically considered in asylum claims is that the government is willfully ignorant (e.g. police) or the security sector is actively complicit in the crimes committed against vulnerable groups.” But in South Africa, she said, “government, public sector and community partnerships are yielding results. Farm murders have gone down, rural safety strategies are now in place, and there is nothing particularly exceptional about how gruesome these murders are when you look at the scale of violence in townships, for example.”
Camus told us he personally witnessed the high level of violence when he visited South Africa in December.
“What I saw in Capetown, Durban and Joburg was, above all, crime everywhere, targeting all communities, in townships as well as downtown,” Camus said. “Drugs are a cause for that. Poverty is another cause. … Farm attacks occur in areas which are less populated, so that farms are easier targets, although farmers are now organized and have set up emergency awareness networks.”
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