Afrikaner Detained By ICE Wonders Why His Whiteness Didn’t Save Him From Trump

Well, well, well — a white Afrikaner from South Africa thought he had an open invitation to enter the U.S. whenever and however he wanted because President Donald Trump has been lying about a “white genocide” in his country, and making it clear that he only wants white immigrants in America, and now he’s sitting in a federal detention center in rural Georgia, wondering how his white privilege card got declined.

Meet Benjamin Schoonwinkel.

According to the New York Times, Schoonwinkel, 59, has spent more than three months in the detention center after he boarded a flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta in September, traveling on a tourist visa and telling U.S. border agents he was seeking asylum upon arrival, which isn’t the way Trump’s refugee program works, even for white people.

From the Times:

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 Trump’s immigration crackdown are being held. He has been there for almost 100 days.

“I never expected this to happen,” Schoonwinkel said in a video interview this month from the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. “I expected a little bit of red tape.”

Schoonwinkel’s case may represent one of the more curious effects of 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 Trump’s policies: long detentions that have typically entangled migrants from Latin America.

Excuse me as I search for the tiniest of my tiny violins.

What really appears to have happened here is that a white man thought he was going to join the white flight movement from post-apartheid South Africa, and he let our white nationalist president gas him up into thinking he could just hop on a plane and call himself American. Instead, he found himself locked up with a couple thousand brown people, and now he’s all confounded, because — who knew ICE was out here running a reverse-DEI program for jail?

Hell, according to Schoonwinkel, even his fellow inmates are confused about how this white man found himself on the wrong side of racist, xenophobic oppression.

“They all ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’” he said.

I mean, I guess it could be true that bewildered brown people are asking him that, or maybe it’s his own Caucasian confusion that he’s just projecting onto the non-whites he doesn’t believe he belongs among.

More from the Times:

In his asylum application, reviewed by The New York Times, Schoonwinkel said that he had been persecuted based on his race, political opinion and membership in a particular social group.

He said that he had been attacked in December 2014 on his farm by two Black men, claiming that they beat him, tied him up and held him at knife point. The property was looted, he said.

“I lost all my hope of walking out alive,” he said, adding that the attack had left “deep emotional scars.” He said he sold his land over security concerns.

He said that he had notarized documents supporting his claim in luggage that U.S. authorities had confiscated, along with his passport.

So, Schoonwinkel claims he was a white farmer who Black men attacked. More than a decade later, he decided to head for the States, where the president has been claiming Black people are attacking white farmers, a claim South African President Cyril Ramaphosa denied to Trump’s face in May, when Trump was presenting false evidence to bolster his false claims that the fictional “white genocide” was happening in the region.

Next month, Schoonwinkel is expected to find out when a hearing will be scheduled for him to present the merits of his case.

“This is the most winnable asylum case I have ever had,” his immigration lawyer, Marty Rosenbluth, told the Times. “All I have to do is present all of Trump’s rhetoric, and everything his administration has been saying, about South Africa.”

What he really means is that all he has to do is show the court how white his client is. And that’s not speculation either.

“I assumed he was Black. Why else would he be in ICE custody?” Rosenbluth said.

“It never crossed my mind he could be Afrikaner,” he continued, citing Trump’s executive order granting white Afrikaners, and only white Afrikaners, a get-in-the-U.S.-free card.

“The motivation behind the executive order makes it clear he should not have been detained for a minute,” he said. “He’s probably the only Afrikaner in immigration detention.”

It’s almost as if these people are fully aware of how privileged white people are across the globe, how racist the Trump administration is, and how white people, regardless of their ethnicity, are supposed to benefit from that racism. And they feel it’s some great injustice when they get treated similarly to the Black and brown people who are supposed to be oppressed.

Anyway, what are y’all having for dinner?

SEE ALSO:

South African Refugee Program Is White’s Only, Report Says

Trump Prioritizes White Afrikaners Over Black And Brown Migrants