As President Donald Trump tries to bar almost all refugees from entering the country, his administration is planning to use federal funds reserved for sick, elderly, and at-risk refugee populations to facilitate an influx of white South Africans within days, according to a government source and an internal memo viewed by the Lever.

The first group of Dutch-descended Afrikaners is scheduled to arrive in the United States imminently, and they will be receiving emergency support from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the memo, which was signed by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy and Office of Refugee Resettlement assistant secretary Andrew Gradison.

The move follows Trump’s February executive order demanding humanitarian relief for Afrikaners. Trump booster Elon Musk — himself a South African immigrant — has said South Africa’s government was unfair and racist to white people.

Since the executive order, US officials have been interviewing white South African applicants who claim to have faced racial discrimination in postapartheid South Africa. At the same time, refugees from the rest of the world, some of whom have been waiting for years to enter the country, have been left in limbo after Trump in January suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program, affecting an estimated 20,000 refugees set to travel to the United States — including 12,000 who already had flights booked. That ban is currently being challenged in court.

In the April 30 memo, which has not previously been reported, officials with the Office of Refugee Resettlement wrote to Kennedy, requesting approval for the “mobilization of immediate support for vulnerable incoming Afrikaner refugees,” including “housing, health services, and resettlement support upon their arrival.”

The group of Afrikaners, officials wrote, was slated to arrive “within a few days of this memo,” and therefore officials needed approval to make emergency arrangements outside of typical refugee resettlement protocol.

Kennedy signed and approved the document that day.

According to a government source familiar with the plans, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has preliminary arrangements to use funds from a program called Preferred Communities to resettle the Afrikaners. The program’s website notes that it is for the most vulnerable refugees arriving in the United States, including “those with serious medical conditions, women at risk, and elderly refugees.”

The agency is preparing to resettle as many as one thousand Afrikaners this year, the source said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request for comment after publication and confirmed that Preferred Communities program funding would be used in resettling Afrikaners.

Last month, US Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) introduced legislation to recognize Afrikaners as Priority 2 refugees — a designation that they are “of special humanitarian concern,” according to the US State Department. Though that legislation has not passed, the Trump administration memo asserts powers in “emergency circumstances [to] provide assistance to refugees without regard to select laws and regulations.”

The use of any refugee resettlement funds — for vulnerable refugees or not — to support white South Africans has drawn fierce outcry. Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, codified the nation’s apartheid racial segregation system in 1948 and subsequently subjected the country’s black population to mass evictions and brutal segregation.

White South Africans, as the end of apartheid neared in the early 1990s, owned the vast majority of the nation’s land. Even decades after the end of the apartheid system, white South Africans still own more than 70 percent of the country’s agricultural land, despite making up less than 10 percent of the overall population. The government’s efforts at land redistribution — including a new January land reform law — are designed to address this disparity.

In his February order, Trump claimed that Afrikaners were “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” as well as “racially discriminatory property confiscation,” and demanded that US officials draft plans to provide relief, including refugee resettlement, to Afrikaners.

Afrikaners have been vocal supporters of Trump, and Musk, who grew up in South Africa under apartheid, has been a vocal opponent of what he calls “racist ownership laws,” in the country. Musk is not himself Afrikaner but descended from more recent British and Canadian white settlers in the country.

Musk has also been vocal about alleged violence against white South African farmers, claiming in 2023 that “they are actually killing white farmers every day.” The country’s courts have found that such claims are baseless.

In the days after Trump’s order was issued in February, senior White House officials met with AfriForum, a powerful group that advocates for South Africa’s Afrikaner minority. The group reportedly requested that Trump intervene in South Africa’s land expropriation policy on behalf of white South Africans.

Though AfriForum formally rejected Trump’s offer of refugee status to Afrikaners, a reported 8,200 Afrikaners have independently expressed interest in the offer.

At the same time, Trump has been attempting to freeze all other refugee admissions into the country, including for those fleeing violence and persecution in the Congo, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

On Monday, a federal judge ordered the government to allow 12,000 refugees, all those who had already made travel plans to the United States, into the country.

But even if the Trump administration complies with that order, thousands more asylum-seekers in the middle of an arduous, yearslong approval process will be left stranded — all while the administration welcomes Afrikaners with open arms.