Trump Offered Them Refugee Status. Thousands Responded.

Donald Trump halted government refugee resettlement programs on his first day in office, but a few weeks later, he decided to carve out an exception for South Africa’s white Afrikaner population. Now thousands of them want to take him up on the offer.

The Washington Post reports that 67,000 people have expressed interest in refugee status, according to a list presented to the U.S. Embassy in South Africa by the South African Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. The chamber became a point of contact for interested white South Africans asking about the program after Trump issued an executive order on February 7 cutting U.S. funding to South Africa, citing “government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

Trump’s order also directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to provide humanitarian assistance to Afrikaners and resettle them in the U.S. Afrikaners, a white minority in South Africa descended from Dutch and French colonists who came to the country in the seventeenth century, make up about 2.7 million of South Africa’s 62 million people.

At the root of Trump’s executive order and refugee plan is a land expropriation law in South Africa that the president and his benefactor, tech oligarch Elon Musk, claim is unfairly seizing property from white landowners in the country. In reality, the law is meant to address decades of white minority rule under the system of apartheid, which disenfranchised the country’s Black majority to the point that white farmers own about 75 percent of the country’s land. To date, the government has not confiscated any land.

Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa, criticized the country earlier this month after his Starlink venture failed to win approval to begin service in South Africa. At the same time, Trump blasted the country in a Truth Social post, again invoking alleged mistreatment of white farmers in the country.

Last week, Rubio announced that South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, was no longer welcome in the county and gave him until Friday to leave the country over criticisms of U.S. policies under Trump. If the U.S. follows through on its plan to take in large numbers of South Africa’s white population while barring other refugees, it will not only hurt relations between the two countries, but the U.S. will look like it is enforcing a racist immigration policy.

Donald Trump has killed the Education Department.

Via executive order, the president stripped apart the centralized authority overseeing the American educational system on Thursday, marking the end of a 45-year-old institution.

“Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making,” Trump said, marking the department’s elimination. “Everybody knows it’s right. The Democrats know it’s right, and I hope they’re going to vote for it because ultimately it may come before them.”

Trump then announced who he said he hoped would be the agency’s last leader, Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

“It’s about time; everybody’s saying it,” Trump said.

Pell grants and Title I funding for low-income students, as well as resources for disabilities and special needs would be “fully preserved,” according to Trump, though the responsibility would be redistributed to “various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them, and that’s very important to Linda, I know, and very important to all of us.”

Congressionally appropriated funds, however, cannot simply be handed to another agency.

Ahead of the executive order, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the drastically downsized agency would continue to administer student loans and Pell grants, with that second part in direct contradiction to Trump’s ultimate announcement. She noted that “any critical functions” of the department would remain, such as providing funding for low-income students and enforcing anti-discrimination policies.

The Education Department was already the smallest Cabinet agency, with just over 4,000 employees. Its budget constituted roughly 4 percent of overall spending, costing American taxpayers $268 billion in 2024, just $14 billion more than it had when President Jimmy Carter brought it into existence in 1979.

“History has proven them right,” Trump said, referring to people who opposed Carter’s creation.

“I’m pleased to report that by offering federal employees two generous buyout options … they were very generous … my administration has initiated a reduction in force and we’re already cutting numbers that were very surprising,” he continued.

The agency has historically been responsible for approving, monitoring, and distributing federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and other aid made available to the public via the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. It’s also been responsible for assessing and analyzing America’s K-12 systems, as well as aggregating data and research on American educational policies. The department also oversaw the implementation of Title IX, and ensured that the American public had equal access to a valuable education.

It’s unclear what the future will look like for a college-going American public with such a massively diminished Education Department.

The Education Department annually distributes $120.8 billion in grants and federal loans to college-bound students, according to the office of Federal Student Aid.

When Trump tapped McMahon to oversee the agency, he said her primary function was to “put herself out of a job.” Since he was on the campaign trail, Trump has promised to dismantle the department in favor of handing the totality of education to the states. His Project 2025–inspired vision will be to the detriment of a great swath of states, however, particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.

“We’re going to have 35 like, different ones,” Trump said during a campaign stop in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in August. “Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30–35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK.”

“You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump said. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”

During the same rally, Trump blamed America’s low educational scores on the federal agency, while comparing individual states to countries that consistently place high on international education rankings, such as Denmark or Norway, which use national socialist structures to fund their public schools.

On Thursday, Trump reiterated that mindset, mocking some states in the nation as “laggards.”

“We’ll work with them. We can all tell you who the laggards will be, right now probably, but let’s not get into that,” Trump said, before name-dropping his ex-home. “They’ll do a job. I think they’ll do a job, and they’ll go to sections of the state—for instance, New York, you’ll have a Manhattan and a Suffolk County and a Nassau County and a Westchester County.… Those counties I think are going to do very well.

“They’re probably going to be the tougher ones, but I think they have a chance to do really well,” said the president, referring to a state that has recently spent more on education per pupil than most other areas of the country.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” Trump told a crowd in Milwaukee in October, explaining how he’d like to see the Education Department shaved down. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

But erasing the federal funding pipeline will only serve to hurt students in low-income areas around the country. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation. In states such as Virginia, whose state lawmakers advocated in November for the end of the Education Department, federal dollars account for approximately 12 percent of the state’s education funding, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Shuttering the Education Department will barely muster up new cashflow to offset the tremendous costs of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

This story has been updated.

A federal judge blocked Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Social Security Administration Thursday.

The order, issued by District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander, prevents DOGE from accessing personally identifiable information, installing “any software” on SSA systems or devices, and accessing or disclosing SSA computer code.

The decision further demanded that Musk and his accomplices delete any sensitive SSA-related information currently in their possession.

Some of that information included Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, medical provider information, employer and employee payment records, employee earnings, addresses, bank records, and tax information.

In a memorandum opinion, Hollander said that DOGE had failed to provide its staffers with the proper training to sensitively navigate such systems, and that the government was instead “hitting a fly with a sledgehammer” in its pursuit to “modernize the system and uncover fraud.” She further accused the government of failing to provide “even a single reason” why DOGE needed “unbridled access” to the agency’s records.

“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”

This story has been updated.

A Canadian politician is urging his constituents to stop traveling to the United States, in the midst of both increased aggressiveness toward Canadian travelers in the U.S. and outright antagonism from the Trump administration.

“Over the last three months our nation has faced an unprecedented threat from our nearest neighbor,” Canadian Member of Parliament Charlie Angus said on Thursday. “A threat to our borders, a threat to our sovereignty, a threat to our very right to exist as an independent democratic nation.… What concerns me is the targeting of Canadian citizens who are crossing the border to work or to visit.

“We have seen too many stories of citizens being pulled out of airport lines and being fingerprinted and deported as if they were criminals. Citizens being kidnapped to illegal detention by ICE. And it’s not just Canadians; we see the attack on backpackers, students, doctors, professors,” Angus continued. “I am here today to say to Canadians to avoid travel to the United States if at all possible, and to call our government to stand up for our Canadian citizens who are being denied their rights by arbitrary detention.”

This news comes shortly after the detention of Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney, who claims that ICE held her “in chains” for 12 days after she attempted to enter the U.S. from Mexico. Multiple European travelers have also been detained by ICE—a French scientist with texts critical of the Trump administration, a Welsh artist who was detained on a visa mix-up, and three Germans who were traveling legally. Trump’s continued campaign for Canada to become the fifty-first state—which is likely more of a contrived justification for his nonsensical tariff regime than an actual goal—certainly isn’t helping.

Our relationship with our northern neighbors is so strained that their politicians—who are in the middle of their own tight campaign season—don’t even want them crossing the border.

A Trump voter whose wife was detained by federal immigration agents apparently still does not regret siding with MAGA in November.

Bradley Bartell, a Wisconsin Trump supporter, witnessed the arrest of his Peruvian wife, Camila Muñoz, last month. Muñoz had overstayed her visa during the pandemic but had no criminal history and had recently applied for her green card—something that the couple believed could be enough to keep her from becoming a target of the Trump administration.

It wasn’t. Instead, ICE agents tore her away from her husband at the airport as the couple returned from their belated honeymoon in Puerto Rico. But that hasn’t hampered Bartell’s opinion of Donald Trump.

“I don’t regret the vote,” Bartell told Newsweek Wednesday.

Bartell has called on his elected leader to reform ICE. Through attempting to navigate America’s immigration system, Bartell said he discovered that the agency “never really has any information” and should be “revamped.”

“It’s all been a nightmare really, taking things as they come and moving forward,” Bartell told the publication. “We have an attorney. The system for getting people through seems to be very inefficient, so it is taking longer than it should.”

Bartell started a GoFundMe to raise $3,000 for Muñoz’s release from ICE custody.

“This money will be used for legal support and the bond money for my wife. Any and all support is deeply appreciated,” Bartell wrote on the public donation page, which so far has raised more than $900. “On top of the lawyer fees, I have been informed that the bond could run upwards of 10k.”

Bartell said he is considering moving himself and his son to Peru in the event that his wife gets deported back to her home country.

Trump has promised to enact the largest deportation program in U.S. history. His anti-immigrant rhetoric is predicated on the falsehood that the people who have entered the U.S. are murderers and rapists, and that they are a drain on the country’s economy and government resources as unemployed migrants struggle to obtain work and housing. In reality, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. And in 2022, approximately 4.5 percent of the workforce was undocumented, contributing to some $75.6 billion in total taxes, according to the American Immigration Council.

Overstaying the length of your permitted immigration by expired visa or otherwise is considered an administrative violation—not a criminal one. But the Trump administration does not seem to care.

“We are prioritizing the worst of the worst and aliens with final removal orders. Secretary Noem’s message is clear: If you come to our country illegally, we will deport you, and you will never return,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security had previously told Newsweek about the administration’s immigration plans.

Still, Bartell doesn’t blame Trump for his administration’s expanded anti-immigration efforts.

“He didn’t create the system, but he does have an opportunity to improve it. Hopefully, all this attention will bring to light how broken it is,” Bartell told Newsweek.

Some of the other people who have been targeted by the immigration agency have lived in the U.S. for decades. They include a woman in her fifties who has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years and is married to a U.S. citizen, a woman in her thirties who first came to the States as a teenager and has proof of valid permanent legal residency, a European woman in her thirties engaged to a U.S. citizen, and a woman engaged to a U.S. legal permanent resident and who has lived in the U.S. for nearly a decade, according to interviews and documents obtained by USA Today.

Even though Republican voters appear to be increasingly irate with the administration’s agenda, some supporters might never turn on Trump—even as their families are taken away from them. Famously, Trump has argued that he could commit murder and not lose the support of his base.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump said at a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”