racism

Colvin’s arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a segregated bus helped spark the modern civil rights movement in the US.

Claudette Colvin, who helped to ignite the modern civil rights movement in the US after refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus, has died aged 86.

Colvin was 15 when she was arrested on a bus in Montgomery, nine months before Rosa Parks gained international fame for also refusing to give up her seat.

Colvin died of natural causes in Texas, according to a statement from her legacy foundation on Tuesday.

Colvin was detained on March 2, 1955, after a bus driver called the police to complain that two Black girls were sitting near two white women in violation of segregation laws. Colvin refused to move when asked, leading to her arrest.

“I remained seated because the lady could have sat in the seat opposite me,” Colvin told reporters in Paris in April 2023.

“She refused because… a white person wasn’t supposed to sit close to a negro,” Colvin said.

“People ask me why I refused to move, and I say history had me glued to the seat,” she added.

Colvin was briefly imprisoned for disturbing public order. The following year, she became one of four Black female plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit challenging segregated bus seating in Montgomery.

The case was successful, impacting public transportation throughout the US, including trains, aeroplanes and taxis.

Colvin’s arrest occurred at a time of growing frustration over how Black people were being treated on Montgomery’s bus system. The arrest of Parks in December 1955 triggered the start of the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The boycott propelled the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr into the national limelight and is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement.

“She leaves behind a legacy of courage that helped change the course of American history,” the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation said in a statement.

‘Too often overlooked’

Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed said Colvin’s action “helped lay the legal and moral foundation for the movement that would change America”.

Colvin’s role in helping to trigger the modern civil rights movement is often overshadowed by the actions of Parks, and Reed said her bravery “was too often overlooked”.

“Claudette Colvin’s life reminds us that movements are built not only by those whose names are most familiar, but by those whose courage comes early, quietly, and at great personal cost,” Reed added.

While Colvin’s arrest helped to bring an end to racial segregation in the US, there are concerns from civil rights groups that President Donald Trump is looking to roll back policies on social progress.

On Tuesday, the largest civil rights group in the US said that Trump was being deceptive in his claims that civil rights hurt white people.

In an interview from last week published by The New York Times, Trump said he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in white people being treated unfairly.

The comments came after Trump was asked whether protections that began in the 1960s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act resulted in discrimination against white men, according to the newspaper.

“It accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people – people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job,” Trump was quoted as saying.

“It was a reverse discrimination,” he said.

In response, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said Trump was “lying through his teeth”.

“Trump does this all the time. He deliberately invents a false reality to lay the groundwork for policies that further benefit the top one percent by privatising government services and stripping resources away from underserved communities,” said Johnson.

The decision is expected to affect about 1,100 people and is likely to face legal challenges.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump will end temporary deportation protections and work permits for some Somali nationals in the US, authorities say.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which shields migrants from deportation to countries where it is deemed unsafe to return and grants temporary work authorisation, for Somalis living in the US.

“Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said in a statement. “Further, allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interests. We are putting Americans first.”

The decision, which is expected to affect about 1,100 people, is likely to face legal challenges.

The Somali community has become a frequent target of the Trump administration. The US president has called Somalis “garbage” and depicted them as criminals.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has lashed out at Somalis in the US, alleging large-scale public benefit fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the country, with about 80,000 members.

Trump has threatened to strip any naturalised Somali or foreign-born person of their US citizenship if they were convicted of fraud, as he continued his attacks on the Somali community.

“We’re going to revoke the citizenship of any naturalised immigrant from Somalia or anywhere else who is convicted of defrauding our citizens,” Trump said on Tuesday.

The administration has additionally cut off Minnesota’s access to federal childcare assistance and surged immigration enforcement agents to the state, home to a sizeable Somali population, prompting widespread anger and condemnation from local and state officials over aggressive immigration raids.

Heavily-armed agents have broken car windows and detained people, used frequent force against protesters, and asked residents for proof of citizenship, drawing concerns from civil liberties groups.

Tensions rose further after a federal immigration agent last week shot and killed Renee Good, a US citizen and mother of three, who had been acting as a legal monitor of federal immigration activity in Minneapolis.

Cape Town, South Africa – Lucy Campbell, with her long grey dreadlocks, stands animated in front of the thick stone walls of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town’s city centre, her small frame accentuated by their towering height.

The 65-year-old activist-turned-historian has a message for the 10 American students who have come to hear her version of the city’s history. Dressed in a black hoodie and blue jeans, Campbell is well-spoken but shows her disdain for Cape Town’s colonial past, often erupting in harsh language for those she blames for its consequences.

“This castle speaks to the first economic explosion in Cape Town,” she says at the beginning of her five-stop tour of the city. “It’s an architectural crime scene.”

Campbell refuses to enter the 17th-century castle, which she sees as a symbol of the violence and dispossession that the colonial era brought to South Africa’s second biggest city.

“That is where they used to hang people,” she says, pointing to one of the castle’s five bastions. It was built by the settlers of the Dutch East India Company, commonly known by its Dutch acronym, VOC. The VOC built the fortress as part of its efforts to establish a refreshment post between the Netherlands and other trade destinations in the East. The castle is now run by the South African military.

Campbell, an accredited tour guide, has been giving privately run tours like this for 17 years, starting at the castle and offering a scathing critique of the city’s monuments and museums for dozens of people each year.

She says most official tributes, such as the Slave Memorial erected in 2008 in Church Square, fail to do justice to the enslaved people who contributed to the construction of Cape Town and often neglect to acknowledge the Indigenous population that lived here for hundreds of years before the Dutch arrived in 1652, displacing them and introducing slavery to the Cape.

Campbell can still see clear echoes in the city of the “genocide” and dispossession of the Khoi people, the Indigenous herders who lived on this land for thousands of years. She remembers her mother’s stories about how this history personally affected her family, who are descendants of the famously wealthy Hessequa, a subset of the Khoi. The Hessequa lost their land and livestock to the Dutch.

Known as “the people of the trees”, the Hessequa lived for centuries in the farming area now known as Swellendam, about 220km (137 miles) east of Cape Town. The arrival of European settlers transformed them from land and cattle owners to peasant workers employed by white people, conditions that in many places persist to this day.

Land ownership in Cape Town and South Africa as a whole remains overwhelmingly in the hands of the white minority. Rights groups have also accused white farmers of sometimes abusing predominantly mixed-race agricultural workers and evicting them on a whim, a practice that has carried on since the colonial era.

“Many of them have worked there for generations, and they are just being evicted,” Campbell says. “There’s no pension. There’s nothing. So the ailments of the past [continue].”

The coloniality of the museum

With a resume that includes posts ranging from trade union administrator and mechanic’s assistant to historian, Campbell started her tours after working at the Groot Constantia estate of the VOC colonial Governor Simon van der Stel, now a museum. This is where she got her first taste for history.

When she started working on the estate as an information officer in 1998, she found that the history of enslaved and Indigenous people was largely erased on the property, including the “tot” system, the use of wine as payments to workers that dates back centuries and was still in use on some Cape Town farms years after the fall of apartheid in 1994.

Alarmed by this erasure of her ancestors at the estate, Campbell resigned and pursued a degree in history. Armed with a postgraduate degree specialising in the history of slavery in the Cape, Campbell established Transcending History Tours in 2008.

Her academic research uncovered the inherently colonial nature of museums globally. She discovered that human remains were held in museums, universities and in private ownership, especially in Europe. The South African Museum, founded in 1825, housed human remains that were used in studies that sought to reinforce racist ideologies, such as seeking to prove that non-Europeans were racially inferior. Even though these studies have been halted, the remains continued to be housed by these institutions.

Campbell would prefer that the museums she tours be decentralised and relocated to the Cape Flats, a mainly nonwhite working-class area where Campbell and most descendants of the Khoi and enslaved people live. She argues this would make the museums more accessible to these communities, bringing them closer to their personal histories and demonstrating that their current difficult living conditions and marginalisation are not natural or inevitable, but rather the result of a cruel past.

“At night, this place is filled with homeless people,” she says on a sunny morning in September as the tour leaves the castle.

A few steps away, past two lions perched on pillars at the castle’s entrance and a moat filled with fish and pondweed, a barefoot man is asleep on the sidewalk while a woman in a bra and camouflage pants scrounges for food in the shrubs. Like most of the unhoused on the wealthy city’s streets, they are people of colour.

The tour passes the Grand Parade, the city’s public square and oldest urban open space, where the mud and wood predecessor to the existing castle stood. For many years, it served as a training ground for the colonial garrison before becoming a marketplace, surrounded by striking buildings, such as the Edwardian City Hall.

The parade’s most famous moment in modern South African history was as the setting of Nelson Mandela’s first public speech after his release from prison in 1990. Today, traders still gather here to sell everything from brightly coloured dashikis (colourful, traditional garments) to kitchen electronics.

A ‘trailblazer’

A few blocks away, the group stops to look at a plaque in St George’s Mall dedicated to one of Campbell’s heroes, Krotoa, a Khoi woman known as the progenitor of Cape Town’s mixed-race population after her marriage to a Danish surgeon.

The plaque dedicated to her in this busy modern commercial area feels misplaced and superficial to Campbell, who says it fails to celebrate the woman’s historical significance. Campbell also dislikes the commonly used image of Krotoa on the plaque, which she says is fabricated.

“The Krotoa that I know, she’s a trailblazer. She’s an interpreter. She’s a negotiator,” Campbell says.

The niece of the Khoi chief Autshumato, Krotoa joined the household of the first Dutch governor in the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, at about the age of 12. As one of the first Indigenous interpreters, she became a mediator between the Dutch and the Khoi, playing a key role in the cattle trade, which was vital to the settlers’ survival at the Cape. She also negotiated in the conflict that arose between locals and the settlers.

Krotoa’s influence in van Riebeeck’s government eventually led to her becoming the first Indigenous person to be baptised as a Christian in 1662 and adopting the name Eva. She married a Danish soldier, who was later appointed as the VOC surgeon, Pieter van Meerhof, in 1664, and the couple became the Cape’s first recorded interracial marriage.

In the end, though, Krotoa was a controversial figure: Khoi leaders criticised her for adopting colonial ways, and both they and Dutch officials accused her of being a spy for the other side.

“She went right into the kitchens of the Dutch,” Campbell says. “She used to tell them, ‘I know you. I know who you are. You can’t do anything for yourself. Slaves have to do everything for you.’”

Campbell says Krotoa was instrumental as a mediator in the first Khoi-Dutch war, which lasted from 1659 to 1660 and was sparked by a campaign led by local Khoi leader Nommoa, or Doman, to reclaim the Cape Peninsula. The Dutch were victorious against the two Khoi groups, the Gorinhaiqua and the Gorachouqua, and expelled them from the peninsula to mountain outposts about 70km (44 miles) away.

Asked what she would consider a fitting memorial for Krotoa, Campbell says: “Monuments are Eurocentric and hierarchic. Where her memorial should be, I am not sure. What I know is that her story and her memory should be a popular memory and part of our learning in schools and in other tertiary learning. She and her Danish husband van Meerhof were sent to Robben Island. She also spent lots of time at the first castle, which is today’s Golden Acre [shopping mall], and her so-called plaque in Castle Street is a humiliation of the contributions she made in resisting the colony in favour of her people.”

Profits over people

Around the corner from Krotoa’s memorial in Castle Street, Campbell stops at another VOC landmark – the cobbled walkway featuring the VOC’s bronze emblem framed by an outline of the castle’s five ramparts.

“I want you to see how the VOC is embedded right in the fabric of the city,” she says, pointing to the insignia emblazoned in the street.

Then she directs her tour’s attention to nearby skyscrapers, which she views as symbols of wealth rooted in VOC exploitation.

As she speaks, workers on their lunch breaks walk by while others sell beaded jewellery, paintings, leather handbags and other wares in stalls dotted along the mall. Most of these workers live in overcrowded townships far outside the city, which is famed for its French Riviera-like lifestyle and has often been voted one of the world’s top tourist destinations.

“For me, it’s important to speak of that company, the first company that came here,” Campbell says, explaining the origin of capitalism in the region.

“It comes from there – profits before people. It comes from history. … The VOC is alive and kicking in the city.”

Restoring memory

The most haunting stop on the tour comes next: the Slave Lodge. It stands on the doorstep of the parliament precinct and the gardens that the VOC established to provide fresh produce to ships journeying between the East and the Netherlands.

Thousands of enslaved people from as far away as Angola, Benin, Indonesia, India and Madagascar were housed here from 1679 to 1811. Converted into a museum, it contains artefacts, including shackles and the reconstructed hull of a slave ship as well as a plinth recording the names of the enslaved people – names assigned to them by slave owners when they arrived at the Cape.

Campbell objects to the pristine exhibits, saying they are in stark contrast to the building’s dark history as a place of suffering and violence. One of the most horrific aspects of life there was the sexual violence inflicted by soldiers on women, including rape and coercion into sex work, often with payments made to the VOC.

This violent culture has had lasting effects, contributing to today’s high levels of sexual crimes and domestic violence on the Cape Flats, according to Campbell.

“The Slave Lodge does not get the reflection that it should get,” Campbell tells her tour. “It is very much veneered and made palatable to the visitors. It doesn’t bring the voices of the women in.”

The tour ends in the street behind the Slave Lodge, where Campbell shows the tourists a macabre landmark they might otherwise miss. On a traffic island in the middle of Spin Street is the spot where the city’s slave auctions were once held. A tree that marked the spot was chopped down in 1916. In its place, a slab of stone was installed in 1953, inscribed with a fading and barely legible message about its historical significance.

“It looks like a drain,” Campbell says, noting the sharp contrast between this neglected memorial and the bronze statue of Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, oddly situated in front of the Slave Lodge, where the plaque bearing his name has been restored to a brilliant gleam.

In 2008, the city tried to rectify this oversight at the auction site, unveiling a commemorative art installation designed by prominent artists Gavin Younge and Wilma Cruise across the street. It consists of 11 granite blocks, roughly at knee height, inscribed with the assigned names of enslaved people and words that recall their tortured reality: “Suicide, infanticide, abscond, escape, flee.”

Activists have criticised the installation for being too cold and failing to convey the deep wounds left by nearly 200 years of slavery.

“Birds s*** on it, people sit on it, but they don’t know what it is,” Campbell says. “They have the names of the slaves that were held at the Slave Lodge, but there’s no story. … It’s a monument that only serves the master, at the end of the day, because it doesn’t bring out the pain of the people.

“I would have loved to see a high rise to bring out the memory of the people, … something more visible.”

Families of victims of the deadly attack on a Jewish celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach earlier this month have called for a national inquiry into rising anti-Semitism.

In an open letter published on Monday, relatives of 11 of the victims of the attack called on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to hold a royal commission into what they called the “rapid” and “dangerous” rise of anti-Jewish sentiment following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.

Fifteen people, most of them Jewish, were killed when two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on December 14.

Australian authorities have said the suspected gunmen, Sajid Akram and his son Naveed, were inspired by the ISIL (ISIS) group.

In their letter, the families said they needed to know why “clear warning signs were ignored” and “how antisemitic hatred … [was] allowed to dangerously grow unchecked”.

“As proud Australians and proud Jews, we have endured more than two and a half years of relentless attacks,” the families said.

“Our children feel unsafe at school and university. Our homes, workplaces, sporting fields, and public spaces no longer feel secure.”

The response of Albanese’s Labor government to the attack, including proposals to tighten gun laws and introduce tougher legislation against hate speech, was “not nearly enough,” the families said.

“The dangerous rise of antisemitism and radicalism in Australia is not going away,” they said.

“We need strong action now. We need leadership now.”

The calls for an inquiry into anti-Semitism came as Albanese on Monday announced the terms of an independent review into whether law enforcement and intelligence agencies could have done more to prevent the attack.

Albanese and his government colleagues have resisted calls for a public inquiry into the attack, arguing that such a process would take years and could undermine social cohesion by platforming extremist voices.

Albanese told a news conference that the review, led by former intelligence chief Dennis Richardson, would examine what authorities knew about the suspected gunmen before the attack and information sharing between federal and state agencies, among other issues.

“Just over two weeks ago, anti-Semitic terrorists tried to tear our country apart, but our country is stronger than these cowards,” Albanese said.

“They went to Bondi Beach to unleash mass murder against our Jewish community. We need to respond with unity and urgency rather than division and delay.”

Anti-Jewish sentiment, as well as anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment, are rising in Australia. Many Australians have expressed their concerns over a rise in right-wing extremism in the country, where one in two people is either born overseas or has a parent born overseas.

In September, thousands of people held rallies in cities, including Sydney, Perth, Canberra and Brisbane, demanding an end to “mass migration”.

The Australian government has condemned the rallies, which took place under the banner of “March for Australia”, as racist, while Minister for Multicultural Affairs Anne Aly said the gatherings were “organised by Nazis”.

The group behind “March for Australia” said on its website and social media that “mass migration has torn at the bonds that held our communities together” and that its rallies aimed to do “what the mainstream politicians never have the courage to do: demand an end to mass immigration”.

But Australia also experienced a sharp rise in both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents since October 7, 2023.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, documented 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents nationwide between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025, after more than 2,060 incidents the previous year.

The Islamophobia Register Australia recorded 309 in-person incidents of Islamophobia and 366 online incidents between January 1, 2023 and November 31, 2024.

Numerous rights organisations, including some Jewish groups, have criticised the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, arguing that it has been used to conflate legitimate criticism of Israel – particularly of its genocidal war on Gaza – with anti-Jewish bigotry.

One of Albanese’s highest-profile critics in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – he blamed Albanese’s government for failing to protect Australia’s Jewish community and also linked the shooting to Australia’s recent decision to recognise Palestinian statehood.

The French star reshaped post-war cinema before retreating from global fame into animal rights activism and, later, far-right politics.

Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became a global sensation before reinventing herself as an animal protection campaigner and outspoken supporter of the far right, has died aged 91.

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announced her death on Sunday, saying “with immense sadness” that its founder and president had died.

In a statement sent to the AFP news agency, the foundation described Bardot as “a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation”. It did not give details about when or where she died.

Bardot rose to international fame in 1956 with her role in And God Created Woman, a film that sought to project female sexuality on screen. She went on to appear in about 50 films, becoming one of the most recognisable faces of post-war French cinema.

In the early 1970s, Bardot quit acting at the height of her fame, turning her attention to animal protection. While her campaigning earned admiration from supporters, her public life grew increasingly controversial as she embraced far-right politics and made repeated racist and inflammatory remarks.

Her activism hardened into open support for France’s far-right National Front, now known as National Rally, and the party’s longtime leader Marine Le Pen. Over the years, French courts convicted Bardot multiple times for inciting racial hatred.

In 2022, a court fined her 40,000 euros ($47,000) after she described people from Reunion, a French overseas territory, as “degenerates” who had “kept their savage genes”. It marked the sixth time authorities had sanctioned her for racist and hate speech. Muslims and immigrants were among her frequent targets.

Born in Paris in 1934, Bardot grew up in a conservative Catholic household and trained as a ballet dancer at the Conservatoire de Paris. She began modelling as a teenager, appearing on the cover of Elle at 15, which led to early film roles and her marriage to director Roger Vadim.

Despite later being hailed by some as a trailblazer for women in cinema, Bardot dismissed complaints about sexual harassment in the film industry.

“Many actresses flirt with producers to get a role. Then when they tell the story afterwards, they say they have been harassed. … In actual fact, rather than benefit them, it only harms them,” she said.

“I thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a pretty little a**. This kind of compliment is nice.”

Last week, Republican Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy challenged other Republicans over their idea that ancestry or heritage is what makes someone truly American.

“The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Ramaswamy, who was born to Indian immigrant parents, said during Turning Point USA’s annual conference.

Remigration — once a fringe far-right notion advocating the deportation of ethnic minorities — is now gaining traction in United States Republican circles as President Donald Trump’s second term enters the final weeks of its first year.

Earlier this year, reports said that the US State Department was considering creating a department of remigration. A few months later, the Department of Homeland Security posted in favour of remigration online.

But it is not just American far-right figures evoking the idea of remigration; European far-right leaders are also joining in.

Here is a closer look at what remigration means and what its origins are.

What is remigration?

Broadly, remigration refers to when an immigrant voluntarily returns to their country of origin.

However, in the context of far-right movements, remigration is a method of ethnic cleansing.

For white ethnonationalists, remigration is a process through which all non-white people are forcibly removed from traditionally white countries.

What are the origins of remigration?

Ideas of remigration trace back to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. The Nazis attempted to “remigrate” the Jews in Germany to Madagascar.

But the concept got wind through the work of Renaud Camus, a French novelist who devised the Great Replacement conspiracy theory in his 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement.

His widely debunked white nationalist theory suggests that elites are replacing white Christians in the West with non-white, primarily Muslim, people through mass migration and demographic changes. Camus calls this “genocide by substitution”.

Far-right nationalists in Europe and beyond have borrowed ideas from this theory.

Heidi Beirich, an expert on the American and European far-right movements, told Al Jazeera that the term remigration is “relatively new” in far-right circles.

Beirich said that the concept was popularised by Martin Sellner.

Sellner, 36, is the leader of Austria’s ultranationalist Identitarian Movement, a far‑right group known for anti-immigration activism and promoting ethnonationalist ideology. Ethnonationalists define the nation primarily by shared ethnicity, ancestry, culture and heritage.

“Remigration advocates the forced removal of non-white people from what Sellner and others with his beliefs view as historically white countries, basically Europe, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand,” Beirich explained.

Beirich said remigration in essence, is a “policy solution to the white supremacist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory”.

Do different groups have different ideas?

There are strands of nationalists beyond ethnonationalism.

Civic nationalists, who also called liberal nationalists or constitutional nationalists, define the nation by shared political values, laws and institutions, regardless of ethnicity. They believe that a person belongs to a country if they hold legal citizenship and are committed to the state’s principles.

While civic nationalists are less enthusiastic about remigration than ethnonationalists, to them, remigration means voluntary return migration. This could mean policies or incentives for immigrants to return to their country of origin if they choose, often for economic, family or cultural reasons.

Why is the idea of remigration becoming mainstream?

Beirich said that Sellner has been pushing this idea with far-right parties in Europe for the past two years.

“The astounding thing is not that a xenophobic political party like AfD in Germany would be open to this, but rather that a white supremacist policy position is now being pushed by the US government.”

The AfD is a far-right party called Alternative for Germany, which is designated an “extremist” organisation in the country.

In May 2025, Axios reported, quoting an unnamed State Department official, that the department is planning to create an “Office of Remigration”.

Then, in an X post on October 14, the Department of Homeland Security wrote “remigrate,” adding a link to its mobile application, which allows US immigrants to self-deport.

Where is the remigration movement picking up?

The idea of remigration has been revived by far-right leaders in Europe as well.

This includes Herbert Kickl, the leader of Austria’s far-right anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPO).

“As People’s Chancellor, I will initiate the remigration of all those who trample on our right to hospitality,” Kickl said in the FPO manifesto ahead of the election in September 2024.

While FPO won most seats in the election, other parties — the conservative People’s Party (OVP), the Social Democrats (SPO) and the liberal NEOS — came together to form a ruling coalition under an early 2025 deal which sidelined the FPO.

Across the border in Germany, Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, referred to “remigration” while supporting the closure of the country’s borders to new immigrants at a party conference in January.

In May 2025, a conference called the Remigration Summit was held in Italy. It was attended by far-right activists from across Europe. InfoMigrants, a website which covers migration issues in Europe, estimated that 400 right-wing activists attended the summit.

But Beirich said that remigration, if implemented as a policy, would in effect be an “attempt to create all-white countries through ethnic cleansing”.

Foreign nationals arrested for illegally processing applications under Trump’s contentious programme for white South Africans.

South Africa has arrested and ordered the deportation of seven Kenyan nationals who were illegally working at a centre processing refugee applications for a highly controversial United States resettlement programme aimed at only white Afrikaners.

The arrests on Tuesday in Johannesburg followed intelligence reports that the Kenyans had entered the country on tourist visas and taken up employment despite South Africa’s Home Affairs Department having previously denied work visa applications for the same positions.

The seven individuals will be banned from re-entering South Africa for five years.

The operation has led to a new diplomatic dispute between Pretoria and Washington, adding to tensions that have escalated throughout 2025 over US President Donald Trump’s widely rejected claims that white South Africans face “genocide” and racial persecution.

The US State Department told CNN that “interfering in our refugee operations is unacceptable” and said it would seek immediate clarification.

CNN reported that two US government employees were briefly detained during the raid, though South Africa’s statement said no American officials were arrested.

The Kenyans were working for processing centres run by Amerikaners, a group led by white South Africans, and RSC Africa, a Kenya-based refugee support organisation operated by Church World Service. These organisations handle applications for Trump’s programme, which has brought small numbers of white South Africans to the US this year.

South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation said the presence of foreign officials coordinating with undocumented workers “raises serious questions about intent and diplomatic protocol” and has initiated formal engagements with both the US and Kenya.

‘If you’re not white, forget about it’

Trump launched the resettlement programme in February through an executive order titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa”, cutting all US aid and prioritising Afrikaner refugees who he claims face government-sponsored discrimination.

In September, he set a historic low refugee ceiling of 7,500 for 2026, with most spots reserved for white South Africans.

Scott Lucas, a professor of US and international politics at University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute, previously told Al Jazeera the contrast between how Trump treats white South African refugees, and refugees of colour from other countries, showed a “perverse honesty” about Trump’s conduct and worldview.

“If you’re white and you’ve got connections you get in,” Lucas said. “If you’re not white, forget about it.”

South Africa’s government strongly rejects the persecution allegations.

Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola has said there is no data supporting claims of white persecution, noting that Afrikaners are among the country’s “most economically privileged” citizens.

Major Afrikaner organisations also rejected Trump’s characterisation.

AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement, representing some 600,000 Afrikaner families, declined his refugee offer, saying emigration would mean “sacrificing their descendants’ cultural identity”.

The Afrikaner enclave of Orania said: “Afrikaners do not want to be refugees. We love and are committed to our homeland.”

Deteriorating relations

Trump has repeatedly presented debunked evidence to support his claims, including a choreographed and televised ambush of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during a White House visit.

Trump played video in May featuring images later verified as being from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and footage of a temporary memorial that Trump falsely claimed showed mass graves.

Relations between the countries have deteriorated sharply this year.

Trump expelled South Africa’s ambassador in March, boycotted Johannesburg’s G20 summit in November, and last month excluded South Africa from participating in the 2026 Miami G20, calling it “not a country worthy of Membership anywhere” in a social media post.

Just one day before the arrests, South Africa condemned its G20 exclusion as an “affront to multilateralism”.