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An Afrikaner flew to the United States expecting protection. Instead, he has spent months locked up in Georgia alongside hundreds of other immigrants.
Miriam Jordan has chronicled the shifts in immigration policy through successive presidencies.
Dec. 26, 2025, 2:50 p.m. ET
Benjamin Schoonwinkel took President Trump at his word.
The United States would welcome South Africans like Mr. Schoonwinkel, white Afrikaners who Mr. Trump said had become victims of government discrimination in the decades since apartheid ended and the country’s Black majority gained political power. Afrikaners who claimed past persecution or fear of future harm could come to the United States as refugees, Mr. Trump declared, even as his administration was closing that door to the rest of the world.
In September, Mr. Schoonwinkel boarded a flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta, and on arrival told U.S. border agents that he was seeking asylum.
But he hadn’t come through the refugee program, as the Trump administration had intended. Rather, Mr. Schoonwinkel, 59, had chosen to travel on a tourist visa and to seek asylum.
Instead of being allowed to enter the country, he found himself in handcuffs. Within two days, he was in a federal detention center in rural Georgia, where about 2,000 people who have been swept up in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown are being held. He has been there for almost 100 days.
“I never expected this to happen,” Mr. Schoonwinkel said in a video interview this month from the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. “I expected a little bit of red tape.”
Mr. Schoonwinkel’s case may represent one of the more curious effects of Mr. Trump’s sweeping reshaping of American immigration. An Afrikaner, excited by the president’s public embrace of his community, travels to the United States expecting a warm welcome, but instead confronts the other side of Mr. Trump’s policies: long detentions that have typically entangled migrants from Latin America.
