A MAN slept outside in a car park overnight in Kenya with his wife and infant son in January, consumed by confusion and disbelief.
The family, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), had been expecting a flight to the US for resettlement in just hours’ time.
But after US President Donald Trump suspended the US refugee programme just two days before the family’s scheduled departure, the man was told their flight to America was abruptly cancelled – less than 24 hours before take-off.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” the man, who asked to go by the name of Pacito to protect his identity, told the BBC.
He had already moved his family from their home, sold his furniture and most of their belongings, and prepared for a new life in America. They remain in Kenya, which is a safer prospect than the DRC, where they fled conflict.
They represent just three of the roughly 120,000 refugees who had been conditionally approved to enter the US, but who now wait in limbo due to the refugee pause.
Trump’s move signalled a major change in the approach that was followed by successive US leaders. Under former President Joe Biden, over 100,000 refugees came to the US in 2024 – the highest annual figure in nearly three decades.
Since entering office in January, Trump has moved quickly to deliver on his campaign promise of an “America first” agenda that has involved dramatically restricting routes by which migrants can come to the US.
The effort has also included an ambitious deportation programme under which people have been deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador against a judge’s orders, as well as revoking visas from over a thousand university students, and offering illegal immigrants a sum of $1,000 each to “self-deport”.
The White House has defended its actions by suggesting that many of those being forced from the country are either violent criminals or threaten America’s interests.
“I didn’t come here for fun”: Afrikaner defends refugee status in US
The president signed an executive order in February that opened the refugee pathway exclusively to Afrikaners – white South Africans who he claimed were victims of “racial discrimination”.
A plane carrying 59 of them landed at an airport just outside Washington DC earlier this month, in a ceremonious greeting that included the deputy secretary of state.
“It’s not fair,” Pacito commented. “There are 120,000 refugees who went through the whole process, the vetting, the security, the medical screenings. We’ve waited for years, but now these (Afrikaners) are just processed in like three months.”
The situation has left Pacito feeling stuck. Since he has sold all of the equipment that he needed to work in his field of music production, for the past few months he has struggled to find odd jobs to earn money for his family. “It’s kind of hard,” he said.
Trump has further justified his decision to accept Afrikaners as refugees in the US because he says they face “a genocide” – a message that has been echoed by Elon Musk, his South African-born close ally.
Such claims have circulated for years, though are widely discredited, and have been denied by South Africa.
However, the call has taken on new animus – particularly among right-wing groups in the US – ever since a law was passed in South Africa in January that allowed the government to seize land from white landowners “when it is just and equitable and in the public interest”. The post-apartheid-era law was meant to address frustrations around South Africa’s disproportionate land ownership; the country’s white population is roughly 7% but owns roughly 72% of farmland.
Though South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said no land has been taken under the new law, days after it was passed, Trump ordered the US to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the country. A diplomatic feud followed.
The fraying relationship was laid bare on Wednesday during a tense White House meeting between the pair. Trump ambushed Ramaphosa on live TV with claims of white “persecution” – an allegation Ramaphosa emphatically rejected.