White South Africans Flee the U.S. Despite Trump’s Refugee Program

Donald Trump claims that white South Africans face persecution and set up a refugee program to help them immigrate to the United States last year, a remarkable exception in his ban on all other refugees. But in reality, many of them are now returning to South Africa.

In November, the South African government set up a portal for people to check their citizenship status after repealing a law that revoked the citizenship of some South Africans who left the country. So far, 12,000 people have used the portal, and at least 1,000 people have reclaimed their citizenship, the country’s Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber ​told Reuters.

“There is definitely a sense of optimism for South Africans abroad,” Schreiber told Reuters. He’s part of the white-led Democratic Alliance party, which has ruled in coalition with the dominant African National Congress for the last two years.

Many of those returning to South Africa are leaving the United States, citing the political situation under the Trump administration. “People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” 53-year-old Andrew Veitch told Reuters, referring to ICE’s attacks in Minneapolis and elsewhere. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.” Veitch, who moved to California in 2003 after being held up at gunpoint in his car, plans to move back to South Africa later this year.

Trump’s program has taken in 3,500 South Africans since it began in May 2025, with applicants complaining to Reuters that they were victims of racially motivated crime and job discrimination due to employment equity laws attempting to correct decades of racial apartheid that disenfranchised South Africa’s Black majority.

Statistically speaking, though, the unemployment rate in South Africa is 35 percent for Black people as opposed to 8 percent for whites, according to government data. Farm murders, an issue that Trump has highlighted using false information, are actually higher for Black South Africans, as well.

Despite Trump’s best efforts, recruitment agencies are seeing increases in white South Africans overseas interested in finding jobs in the country. Others are interested in returning due to the lower cost of living and scoff at Trump’s claim that they would face a “genocide.”

Greg Bovino may no longer be atop the U.S. Border Patrol, but documents leaked to The American Prospect suggest there’s still a sea change inside the organization being pushed by his cronies.

One such memo, sent during Border Patrol’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, advises agents how to smash car windows and extract suspects from their cars while minimizing harm—and protecting the agent from legal responsibility.

“Courts evaluate the totality of the circumstances: no single factor is determinative. Your detailed articulation of the event, including prescribed threats and rationale for actions, is crucial for legal defensibility,” the memo reads.

While physically dragging people through a car’s shattered window may be excessive, the memo adds that “breaking a window to remove the driver or passenger may ultimately become necessary.

Another section of the document says to “ensure lethal coverage is available, if necessary, in accordance with use of force policy.” It was written in November 2025, a month before agents from Border Patrol and ICE began pouring into Minnesota, where they would eventually kill two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

A different memo dated February 9 addresses the revocation of a 2022 safety guidance that prohibited Border Patrol from arresting noncitizens in rivers and while they were physically on the border fence, as well as forcing them back into those dangerous areas while pursuing them. The safety guidance also forbade agents from forcing noncitizens back to the Mexican side of the border once they had crossed.

The February memo happily remarked that the 2022 safety guidance had been repealed. “Rescinding this policy restores agents’ authority to interdict, apprehend, and rescue individuals engaged in illegal crossings,” it reads.

The memos show how Bovino and his disciples altered Border Patrol protocol from the inside, away from public scrutiny. The Prospect identified seven different Border Patrol agents who tagged along with Bovino from his post in El Centro, California, to help him carry out this new, increasingly violent agenda.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is banning press photographers from department briefings on the U.S. war on Iran because he didn’t like the way he looked in recent photos.

Anonymous sources told The Washington Post that Hegseth and his staff called photos of him taken by photographers from large outlets like Reuters, the Associated Press, and Getty Images at a March 2 briefing “unflattering.”

“In order to use space in the Pentagon Briefing Room effectively, we are allowing one representative per news outlet if uncredentialed, excluding pool,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement. “Photographs from the briefings are immediately released online for the public and press to use. If that hurts the business model for certain news outlets, then they should consider applying for a Pentagon press credential.” Photographers have been kept out of the past two briefings since.

When Post reporter Scott Nover emailed the White House Press Office asking plainly why the Pentagon wasn’t allowing photographers into press briefings, deputy press secretary Anna Kelly replied, “Didn’t The Washington Post just fire all of its White House photographers?”

It’s unclear what photo set Hegseth off, or if this is just another excuse to kick more journalists out of the Pentagon. It’s a sensitive move for an extremely public figure who used to be on television frequently.

Donald Trump is pulling out all of the stops to get rid of one of his only Republican critics. 

The president is traveling to Kentucky Wednesday to campaign against Representative Thomas Massie, who not only voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” but has also been a thorn in Trump’s side over the Jeffrey Epstein files and the Iran war. 

Trump is visiting Hebron, Kentucky, just outside of Cincinnati, ostensibly to talk about the economy, but it just happens to be in Massie’s district. Ahead of the visit, Trump doubled down on his endorsement of Massie’s primary opponent, farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. Meanwhile, a super PAC aligned with the president has already spent $2.6 million on the race.  

In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump mocked Massie, making a prediction that “‘Representative’ Thomas Massie will go down as the WORST Republican Congressman in the long and fabled history of the United States Congress.” Massie responded on X with a sarcastic prediction of his own, noting how Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Trump’s feud with Massie goes back months, and he’s hoping that he can single-handedly convince the conservatives in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district, a safe Republican seat. But Massie has endured Trump’s threats and withstood a highly funded attempt by pro-Israel interests to unseat him in 2024. 

Those same interests have gotten involved in this race, with the Republican Jewish Committee Victory Fund producing an ad presenting the primary contest as a choice between “Gallrein and Trump or Massie, who stands with Iran.” The ad shows Massie alongside Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Democratic Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who happen to be Muslims. Will that plus Trump’s efforts be enough to unseat Massie? 

It appears that the Defense Department downplayed the severity of the retaliatory strike that killed six U.S. service members in Kuwait.

In addition to those killed two weeks ago, more than 30 military members were hospitalized by an Iranian drone strike on a makeshift tactical operations center in Kuwait, with dozens suffering from injuries, including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma, multiple sources told CBS News.

Of the 25 service members transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, 20 arrived on a C-17 military transport aircraft with injuries designated as “urgent” and requiring immediate evacuation. More than 100 medical personnel were dispatched to Landstuhl to assist in the surge of patients, one of the sources told CBS.

Additionally, 12 service members were hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and one was sent to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Iran targeted the makeshift operations center in the early hours of the U.S. and Israel’s aerial bombing campaign. The U.S. military personnel stationed there reportedly received no counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar defense; didn’t get the drone defense systems they asked for; and didn’t hear the warning sirens in time.

The next day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the deadly strike in Kuwait “a squirter,” and later complained that reporting on the troops killed was a ploy to make the president look bad.

The Defense Department did not release information about how many were hurt in the strike. U.S. Central Command initially claimed that five had been seriously wounded. “Several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions—and are in the process of being returned to duty,” the post on social media read.

The Pentagon has a process by which it notifies families of wounded soldiers, and seeks to prevent them from learning about injuries in press releases.

The strike in Kuwait has presented an early flashpoint for the president’s illegal war in Iran, which seems to have no end date or clear objective. New revelations about the scale of injuries and destruction should raise questions about the Pentagon’s transparency—or lack thereof.