Refugees

The Dutch government collapsed on Tuesday after far-right politician Geert Wilders pulled out of the right-wing coalition after a dispute over anti-immigration measures his party had proposed.

Wilders’ decision prompted the Dutch cabinet and Prime Minister Dick Schoof to resign.

Here is what triggered the government’s collapse, and what happens next:

Why did Wilders withdraw?

Wilders announced the withdrawal of his right-wing party, the Party for Freedom (PVV), from the 11-month-old right-wing Netherlands coalition government. Wilders said the other three parties in the coalition had failed to back his plans to crack down on asylum for refugees.

“No signature under our asylum plans. The PVV leaves the coalition,” Wilders wrote in an X post on Tuesday after a brief meeting in parliament with party leaders. Besides PVV, the coalition comprised People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) and the New Social Contract (NSC).

On May 26, Wilders announced a 10-point plan to extensively slash migration, deploying army officials at the Dutch land borders and rejecting all asylum seekers. Wilders threatened, back then, that his party would pull out of the coalition if migration policy was not toughened.

The four parties cumulatively held 88 seats in the country’s 150-seat House of Representatives.

The PVV won the latest November 2023 election with 23 percent of the vote and 37 seats, the highest number of seats in the parliament out of all parties.

The majority mark in the House is 76 seats. The withdrawal leaves the coalition with only 51 seats.

When did Schoof step down?

After Wilders announced the withdrawal, an emergency cabinet meeting was called. After this, Schoof announced that he would step down, hours after the PVV withdrawal.

“I have told party leaders repeatedly in recent days that the collapse of the cabinet would be unnecessary and irresponsible,” Schoof said in the emergency cabinet meeting. “We are facing major challenges both nationally and internationally that require decisiveness from us.”

How did other Dutch leaders react?

Other leaders in the coalition called Wilders “irresponsible” and blamed him for putting his own political interests ahead of the country.

“There is a war on our continent. Instead of meeting the challenge, Wilders is showing he is not willing to take responsibility,” said Dilan Yesilgoz, leader of the VVD, which has 24 seats in the the House.

“It is irresponsible to take down the government at this point,” NSC leader Nicolien van Vroonhoven said about Wilders. The NSC has 20 seats.

Head of the opposition GreenLeft-Labour alliance Frans Timmermans said he could “see no other way to form a stable government” than early elections.

What’s next?

Schoof will now formally submit his resignation to the head of state, Dutch King Willem-Alexander. After this, elections are expected to be called. It is likely that the election will be held sometime in October or November, based on previous cycles.

As of May 31, polls show that Wilders’ PVV has lost a little of its support, from 23 percent in the 2023 election to 20 percent.

This brings the party almost at par with the GreenLeft-Labour alliance, which has 19 percent of support and 25 seats in the lower house of parliament, the second highest number of seats after the PVV.

The fragmented politics of the Netherlands makes it difficult to predict which party will win the election. It is unlikely for a single party to win the 76-seat majority and it takes months for a coalition to form. According to the Dutch election authority’s data, no single party has ever won a majority since the first direct elections in 1848.

What happens until elections?

Schoof has said he and the other ministers of the coalition will continue with their positions in a caretaker government until a new government is formed after elections.

The political crisis comes as the Netherlands is scheduled to host a summit of NATO leaders at The Hague on June 24-25. Mark Rutte, the current secretary-general of NATO, was the prime minister of the Netherlands from 2010 to 2024. Rutte was affiliated with the VVD.

Schoof had also been involved in European efforts to provide support to Ukraine in its war against Russia. In February, the Dutch PM was present at a meeting with other European leaders in Paris where the leaders pledged to provide Ukraine with security guarantees.

Deadly attack on United Nations convoy in Sudan disrupts aid to hunger-stricken families in the war-torn country.

An ambush on a United Nations food aid convoy in Sudan has killed at least five people, blocking urgently needed supplies from reaching civilians facing starvation in the war-torn Darfur city of el-Fasher.

Aid agencies confirmed on Tuesday that the 15-truck convoy was transporting critical humanitarian supplies from Port Sudan to North Darfur when it was attacked overnight.

“Five members of the convoy were killed and several more people were injured. Multiple trucks were burned, and critical humanitarian supplies were damaged,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said in a joint statement.

The agencies did not identify the perpetrators and called for an urgent investigation, describing the incident as a violation of international humanitarian law. The route had been shared in advance with both warring parties.

The convoy was nearing al-Koma, a town under the control of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), when it came under fire. The area had witnessed a drone attack earlier in the week that killed civilians, according to local activists.

Fighting between the RSF and the Sudanese army has raged for over two years, displacing millions and plunging more than half of Sudan’s population into acute hunger. El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, remains one of the most vulnerable regions.

“Hundreds of thousands of people in el-Fasher are at high risk of malnutrition and starvation,” the UN statement warned.

Both sides blamed each other for the attack. The RSF accused the army of launching an air attack on the convoy, while the army claimed RSF fighters torched the trucks. Neither account could be independently verified.

The attack is the latest in a string of assaults on humanitarian operations.

In recent weeks, RSF shelling targeted WFP facilities in el-Fasher, and an attack on El Obeid Hospital in North Kordofan killed several medical staff. Aid delivery has become increasingly perilous as access routes are blocked or come under fire.

Judges say Berlin broke EU law by refusing Somali asylum seekers entry.

A Berlin court has ruled that Germany violated asylum law when it deported three Somali nationals at its border with Poland in a decision that challenges Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s aggressive new migration stance.

The three asylum seekers – two men and one woman – were turned back by border police at a train station in Frankfurt an der Oder, a city on Germany’s eastern border.

“The applicants could not demand to enter Germany beyond the border crossing,” the court said in a statement on Monday. “However, the rejection was unlawful because Germany is obliged to process their claims.”

Officials cited the asylum seekers’ arrival from a “safe third country” as grounds for their refusal.

But the court determined the expulsion was illegal under European Union rules, specifically the Dublin regulation, which requires Germany to assess asylum claims if it is the responsible state under the agreement.

It marks the first such legal ruling since Merz’s conservative-led coalition took office in February, riding a wave of anti-immigration sentiment that has helped boost the far-right Alternative for Germany party, now the country’s second largest political force in parliament.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt defended the deportations, saying the asylum system was failing under pressure. “The numbers are too high. We are sticking to our practice,” he told reporters, adding that the court would receive legal justifications for the government’s position.

Migration policies in doubt

But opposition lawmakers were quick to capitalise on the ruling. Irene Mihalic of the Greens called it “a severe defeat” for Merz’s government, accusing it of overstepping its powers “for populist purposes”.

“The border blockades were a rejection of the European Dublin system and have offended our European neighbours,” she said.

Karl Kopp, managing director of Pro Asyl, an immigration advocacy group, said the expulsion of the Somalis reflected an “unlawful practice of national unilateral action” in asylum policy and called for their return to Germany, the Reuters news agency reported.

The ruling also casts doubt on Merz’s wider migration agenda. In May, his government introduced a directive to turn back undocumented people at Germany’s borders, including those seeking asylum – a sharp departure from former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s more open policy during the 2015 migrant crisis.

Last month, the European Commission proposed a bloc-wide mechanism that would permit member states to reject asylum seekers who passed through a “safe” third country. The measure, widely criticised by rights groups, still awaits approval from national parliaments and the European legislature.

Local media reports say the small vessel appeared to be packed with more than 100 people.

Four women and three girls have died when a small boat carrying dozens of refugees and migrants capsized while approaching the port at one of Spain’s Canary Islands, according to Spanish emergency services.

Local media reports said the small vessel seemed to be packed on Wednesday with more than 100 people. Spanish rescuers and members of the Red Cross pulled people out of the water.

Red Cross spokesman Alexis Ramos told broadcaster RTVE there could be “more than 100 people” on the boat but he was unable to provide a figure for the number of those missing.

Spain’s maritime rescue service said the boat tipped over as rescuers began removing minors after it had arrived at a dock on the island of El Hierro. The service had initially located the boat about 10km (6 miles) from shore.

The sudden movement of people on the boat caused it to tip and then turn over, dumping the occupants into the water, the service said.

Canary Islands emergency services said four women, a teenage girl and two younger girls died in the accident. A helicopter evacuated two more children, a girl and a boy, to a local hospital in critical condition after they nearly drowned, the service added.

The Spanish archipelago located off Africa’s western coast has for years been a main route for refugees and migrants who risk their lives in dinghies and rubber boats unfit for long journeys in the open sea.

Thousands have died on the way to European territory on a treacherous journey from Africa over the Atlantic Ocean.

Nearly 47,000 people who made the crossing last year reached the Canary Islands. Most were citizens of Mali, Senegal and Morocco with many boarding boats to Spain from the coast of Mauritania.

The arrivals include thousands of unaccompanied children.

Claude fears he may soon die – either from starvation or violence – as he waits at a food distribution tent in a refugee camp in Burundi.

He is among thousands of Congolese refugees trapped between a brutal conflict across the border and severe reductions in international food assistance.

A former bouncer from Uvira, a town in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Claude fled after violence erupted in the east, sparked by the rapid advance of the Rwanda-backed M23 group.

Armed groups “were shooting, killing each other, … raping women,” recalled the 25-year-old, who escaped across the border into Burundi in February.

In the overcrowded Musenyi camp, Claude now faces a different struggle as food rations dwindle.

Hunger has fuelled new tensions within the camp, prompting Claude to join volunteers who patrol the area to prevent theft of what supplies remain.

“When I arrived here, I was given 3.5kg [7.7lb] of rice per month. Now it’s a kilo [2.2lb]. The 3kg [6.6lb] of peas have dropped to 1.8kg [4lb]. What I get in tomato sauce lasts one day. Then it’s over,” said Claude, whose name has been changed for security reasons, as have the names of other refugees interviewed.

Some of the most desperate resort to slashing neighbours’ tents in search of food, he added, while gangs “spread terror”.

“The reduction of assistance will lead to many crimes,” he warned.

Oscar Niyibizi, the camp’s deputy administrator, described the cut in food rations as a “major challenge” that could “cause security disruption”.

He urges refugees to cultivate land nearby but said external support remains desperately needed.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump slashed its aid budget by 80 percent, and other Western nations have also reduced donations. As a result, many NGOs and United Nations agencies have been forced to close or significantly scale back their programmes.

These cutbacks have come at a “very bad time” as fighting escalates in the DRC, according to Geoffrey Kirenga, head of mission for Save the Children in Burundi.

Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries, has received more than 71,000 Congolese refugees since January while still hosting thousands from previous conflicts.

Established last year to accommodate 10,000 people, the Musenyi camp’s population is now nearly twice that number.

In addition to food shortages, the reduction in aid has led NGOs to discontinue support services for survivors of sexual violence, who are numerous in the camp, Kirenga said.

His gravest concern is that “deaths from hunger” may become inevitable.

The World Food Programme has halved rations since March and warned that without renewed US funding, all assistance could end by November.

According to the UN, hundreds of Congolese refugees are compelled to risk returning across the border in search of food.

UNHCR says two shipwrecks on May 9 and 10 could be the ‘deadliest tragedy at sea’ involving Rohingya so far this year.

At least 427 Rohingya, Myanmar’s Muslim minority, may have perished at sea in two shipwrecks on May 9 and 10, the United Nations said, in what would be another deadly incident for the persecuted group.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR) said in a statement on Friday that – if confirmed – the two incidents would be the “deadliest tragedy at sea” involving Rohingya refugees so far this year.

“The UN refugee agency is gravely concerned about reports of two boat tragedies off the coast of Myanmar earlier this month,” UNHCR said in the statement, adding that it was still working to confirm the exact circumstances surrounding the shipwrecks.

According to the agency, preliminary information indicated that a vessel carrying 267 people sank on May 9, with only 66 people surviving, and a second ship with 247 Rohingya on board capsized on May 10, with just 21 survivors.

The Rohingya on board were either leaving Bangladesh’s huge Cox’s Bazar refugee camps or fleeing Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, the statement said.

Persecuted in Myanmar for decades, thousands of Rohingya risk their lives every year to flee repression and civil war in their country, often going to sea on board makeshift boats.

In a post on X, UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi said news of the double tragedy was “a reminder of the desperate situation” of the Rohingya “and of the hardship faced by refugees in Bangladesh as humanitarian aid dwindles”.

In 2017, more than a million Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh from Myanmar’s Rakhine State following a brutal crackdown by Myanmar’s military.

At least 180,000 of those who fled are now facing deportation back to Myanmar while those who stayed behind in Rakhine have endured dire conditions confined to refugee camps.

In 2021, the military launched a coup in Myanmar, ousting the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then, Rakhine has been the scene of fierce fighting between the military and the Arakan Army, an ethnic minority rebel group, for control of the state amid a widening civil war in the country.

“The dire humanitarian situation, exacerbated by funding cuts, is having a devastating impact on the lives of Rohingya, with more and more resorting to dangerous journeys to seek safety, protection and a dignified life for themselves and their families,” said Hai Kyung Jun, who leads UNHCR’s regional bureau for Asia and the Pacific.

In 2024, some 657 Rohingya died in the region’s waters, according to UNHCR.

Humanitarian organisations have been hit hard by funding cuts from major donors, led by the United States administration of President Donald Trump and other Western countries, as they prioritise defence spending prompted by growing fears of Russia and China.

UNHCR is seeking financial support to stabilise the lives of Rohingya refugees in host countries, including Bangladesh, and those displaced inside Myanmar.

Its request for $383m for support in 2025 is currently only 30 percent funded, the agency said.

Johannesburg, South Africa – When the millionaire mining magnate-turned-president of South Africa landed in Washington to meet the billionaire real estate tycoon-turned-president of the United States, it was with a deal in mind.

Tensions have been escalating between the US and its African trade ally since Donald Trump took office this year, cut off aid to South Africa, repeated false accusations that a “white genocide” is taking place there and began welcoming Afrikaners as refugees.

At the meeting between Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House on Wednesday, the South African president began by focusing heavily on trade and investments, highlighting the two countries’ years of cooperation, in keeping with statements made by South Africa’s presidency that Ramaphosa would present a trade deal to the US.

But Trump responded with a well-prepared redirect that South African media and analysts described as an “ambush” and a move that “blindsided” Ramaphosa.

Ready with printouts of news articles about alleged white victims of killings in South Africa and a video of firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing Kill the Boer, Trump insisted that white farmers were being targeted and murdered – an assertion Ramaphosa politely yet firmly denied, saying criminality was a problem for all South Africans regardless of race.

The team Ramaphosa assembled to join him on his working visit – which included four white South Africans: two golf legends, the wealthiest man in the country and the agriculture minister – all reaffirmed Ramaphosa’s facts that while violence was widespread, white people were not specifically being targeted.

“We have a real safety problem in South Africa, and I don’t think anyone wants to candy-coat that,” said John Steenhuisen, the agriculture minister and a member of the Democratic Alliance party, which is part of South Africa’s governing coalition.

“Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work,” the minister, who is himself an Afrikaner, said. Trump claimed that “thousands” of white farmers were fleeing South Africa.

Steenhuisen added that the people in the video Trump showed were leaders of opposition minority parties and his party had joined forces with Ramaphosa “precisely to keep those people out of power”.

‘The lion’s den’

The meeting began cordially where Trump complimented South African golfers, including well-known Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were part of the delegation. They both implored Trump for enhanced trade to uplift South Africa’s economy.

Also in the delegation was South Africa’s richest man, Johann Rupert, a luxury-goods mogul and an Afrikaner. He countered claims of racial persecution against the white minority, saying that while criminality was rife, Black people were more often the victims.

“We have too many deaths, but it’s across the board. It is not only white farmers,” Rupert said to Trump.

Ramaphosa kept his cool, local media and observers said, noting that the South African president chose to remain calm, patient and light-hearted even in light of Trump’s attack.

He steered talks back to trade, saying South Africa needed economic investment from its allies, and mostly sat expressionless while the video was played, occasionally stretching his neck to look at it.

Ramaphosa went into “the lion’s den” and was met with an ambush but he remained calm, South African political analyst Sanusha Naidu said.

“Ramaphosa and the delegation did not allow themselves to be baited into an emotional response. That’s critical. They made Trump feel like he had the upper hand in the meeting,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that given the narrative from Trump before Ramaphosa’s arrival, it “could have gone worse”.

When asked by a reporter whether he wanted the impasse between the US and South Africa resolved, Trump said he was open to it.

“I hope it has to be resolved. It should be resolved,” he said, adding that if it were not resolved, it would be “the end of the country”.

‘Reset’ relations

Before the two leaders met on Wednesday, Ramaphosa’s office said the aim was to “reset” relations, especially as the US is South Africa’s second largest trading partner after China.

“Whether we like it or not, we are joined at the hip, and we need to be talking to them,” the South African president said before his trip.

Christopher Isike, a political scientist at the University of Pretoria, told Al Jazeera that direct engagement between the leaders was important, given the tense relations between their countries.

“This is an opportunity for South Africa to correct misinformation peddled by President Trump and try to reset trade relations between the two countries,” he said.

Isike noted that both presidents’ backgrounds as businesspeople could provide common ground for discussing mutually advantageous deals.

“Rich friends of Ramaphosa are also rich friends of Trump, and that may have helped facilitate the meeting,” Isike added.

Common ground and level heads would be useful as the leaders continued private talks away from the media on Wednesday, observers said.

Before the visit, Ramaphosa maintained that while Trump was a dealmaker, he too was adept at making deals and even joked about the possibility of playing a round of golf with his US counterpart.

Washington, however, has criticised Pretoria for a host of matters since Trump took office. This continued in the meeting on Wednesday.

Trump focused on the white farmers, particularly Afrikaners – the descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who instituted apartheid. He alleged they are being killed because of their race despite evidence showing that attacks and killings are common across all groups in the country.

Trump also mentioned South Africa’s land reform law that allows land in the public interest to be taken without compensation in exceptional circumstances in an effort to redress apartheid injustices. Pretoria said no white land has been taken, but the US said the law unfairly targets minority white South Africans who are the majority landholders.

Despite Pretoria consistently seeking to rectify false assertions, the Trump administration has pushed ahead with a plan to take in Afrikaners as refugees. The first group arrived last week. He has also cut aid, including vital support for life-saving HIV programmes, to South Africa.

Additionally, there are worries that Trump may not attend the Group of 20 summit being held in South Africa in November and his government may not renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), key US trade legislation that assists economies in sub-Saharan Africa. It expires in September.

Trade and investments

Before Wednesday’s meetings, Ramaphosa said strengthening trade relations between the two countries was his primary motivation for travelling to Washington, DC.

“We want to come out of the United States with a really good trade deal, investment promotion. We invest in the United States, and they invest in us. We want to strengthen those relations. We want to consolidate relations between the two countries,” he said.

This week, South Africa’s ministers of trade and agriculture, Parks Tau and Steenhuisen, met with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to present the first draft of a trade deal.

In 2024, total goods trade between the US and South Africa amounted to $20.5bn. This included $5.8bn in US exports to South Africa and $14.7bn in South African exports to the US.

However, some observers said that at the heart of the potential trade deal is what South Africa could offer billionaire and close Trump ally, Elon Musk, given his ongoing claims about obstacles he allegedly faces in operating Starlink, his satellite internet company, in the country where he was born due to its transformation laws.

These laws seek to redress past injustices that kept Black people destitute and require businesses over a certain size to have a 30 percent equity stake held by members of previously disadvantaged groups.

Speaking at the Doha Economic Forum on Tuesday, Musk reiterated his assertions about laws he claimed were biased against white people despite experts explaining that most of those only seek to promote racial justice.

“All races must be on equal footing in South Africa. That is the right thing to do. Do not replace one set of racist laws with another set of racist laws, which is utterly wrong and improper,” Musk said.

“I am in an absurd situation where I was born in South Africa but cannot get a licence to operate Starlink because I am not Black,” he claimed.

Before Wednesday’s meeting, a White House official told the Reuters news agency Trump is likely to tell Ramaphosa that all US companies in South Africa should be exempt from “racial requirements”.

Opposition figure Malema’s party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), threatened legal action after news that the government was considering offering regulatory assurances to Musk’s Starlink. The EFF said the move would be unconstitutional and shows Ramaphosa is willing to compromise the country’s sovereignty to “massage the inflated ego of Musk and Trump”.

Isike said that while trade concessions would be discussed, he doubted the South African government would give up its laws to appease Musk.

“I will be surprised if Starlink gets its way by refusing to follow South African transformation laws, which require 30 percent Black ownership of a foreign company,” he said.

‘Genocide’ claims

Meanwhile, in private talks, Ramaphosa and Trump were also expected to discuss foreign policy issues, including peace prospects between Russia and Ukraine and South Africa’s support for Palestine and its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Some political observers said Pretoria is in the US crosshairs partly because of its actions against the key Washington ally.

Patrick Bond, a sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg, predicted before the talks that the US might offer to retract claims of “white genocide” in exchange for South Africa dropping its case at the ICJ.

South Africa is seeking to hold Israel accountable for its assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The US is Israel’s strongest ally and arms supplier.

“We are very rational when it comes to discussing global and geopolitical matters. We will put South African positions first, and our foreign policy positions will be clarified,” Ramaphosa said before the meeting.

As the Gaza genocide case against Israel continues in The Hague, US allegations of a widely discredited “white genocide” in South Africa continue to follow the country’s leadership.

Before Trump and Ramaphosa retreated to private meetings on Wednesday, a reporter asked the US president if he had decided whether genocide was being committed in South Africa. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he replied.

The unfounded claim of white genocide has “taken on a life of its own”, analyst Paolo von Schirach, president of the Global Policy Institute in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

It will be difficult for Ramaphosa and Trump to rebound after the Oval Office “ambush”, he said.

“We know that Elon Musk certainly fanned this story [about a white genocide], and he’s probably not the only one,” von Schirach said. “It’s going to be hard for Trump to say, ‘Oh, so sorry. I was misinformed.’”

Ruth Eleonora López has defended Venezuelan immigrants deported to El Salvador by US President Trump’s administration.

A prominent human rights lawyer known for defending immigrants deported amid United States President Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration policies has been arrested in El Salvador.

Ruth Eleonora López, 47, a senior figure at the rights group Cristosal and a vocal critic of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, was detained late on Sunday.

The arrest was confirmed by the country’s attorney general’s office, which in an online post accused López of embezzling state funds during her time at El Salvador’s electoral court more than a decade ago.

“Neither her family nor her legal team has managed to find out her whereabouts,” Cristosal said in a statement, calling the refusal to disclose her location or allow access to lawyers “a blatant violation of due process”.

The group said her arrest “raises serious concerns about the increasing risks faced by human rights defenders in El Salvador”.

López has publicly criticised the government’s mass incarceration of alleged gang members, many of whom have not been charged.

Cristosal, one of the most prominent human rights groups in Latin America, has assisted Salvadoran families caught in Bukele’s security policies, as well as more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants who have been deported to El Salvador under Trump’s administration.

Bukele, who has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and has cultivated close ties with Trump, said earlier this year that El Salvador is ready to house US prisoners in a sprawling mega-prison opened last year.

In March, Trump used rarely invoked wartime powers to send dozens of Venezuelans to El Salvador without trial, alleging ties to the Tren de Aragua gang – a charge their families and lawyers deny.

The US Supreme Court on Friday barred the Trump administration from quickly resuming swift deportations of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

In April, Cristosal reported that police had entered its offices during a news conference to film and photograph journalists and staff members – part of what observers say is a broader campaign of harassment and intimidation against civil society organisations and independent media.

López was recognised by the BBC as one of the world’s 100 most inspiring and influential women for her commitment to justice and the rule of law.

A joint statement signed by more than a dozen rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, demanded her immediate release.

“El Salvador’s state of exception has not only been used to address gang-related violence but also as a tool to silence critical voices,” the statement said.

“Authoritarianism has increased in recent years as President Nayib Bukele has undermined institutions and the rule of law, and persecuted civil society organizations and independent journalists,” it added.

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Kat Renfroe was at Mass when she saw a volunteer opportunity in the bulletin. Her Catholic parish was looking for tutors for Afghan youth, newly arrived in the United States.

There was a personal connection for Renfroe. Her husband, now retired from the Marine Corps, had deployed to Afghanistan four times. “He just never talked about any other region the way he did about the people there,” she said.

She signed up to volunteer. “It changed my life,” she said.

That was seven years ago. She and her husband are still close to the young man she tutored, along with his family. And Renfroe has made a career of working with refugees. She now supervises the Fredericksburg migration and refugee services office, part of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington.

That faith-based work is now in peril. As part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, his administration banned most incoming refugees in January and froze federal funds for the programs. Across the country, local resettlement agencies like hers have been forced to lay off staff or close their doors. Refugees and other legal migrants have been left in limbo, including Afghans who supported the U.S. in their native country.

The upheaval is particularly poignant in this part of Virginia, which boasts both strong ties to the military and to resettled Afghans, along with faith communities that support both groups.

Situated south of Washington and wedged among military bases, Fredericksburg and its surrounding counties are home to tens of thousands of veterans and active-duty personnel.

Virginia has resettled more Afghan refugees per capita than any other state. The Fredericksburg area now has halal markets, Afghan restaurants and school outreach programs for families who speak Dari and Pashto.

Many of these U.S.-based Afghans are still waiting for family members to join them — hopes that appear on indefinite hold. Families fear a new travel ban will emerge with Afghanistan on the list. A subset of Afghans already in the U.S. may soon face deportation as the Trump administration ends their temporary protected status.

“I think it’s tough for military families, especially those who have served, to look back on 20 years and not feel as though there’s some confusion and maybe even some anger about the situation,” Renfroe said.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced in April that it was ending its decades-old partnership with the federal government to resettle refugees. The move came after the Trump administration halted the program’s federal funding, which the bishops’ conference channels to local Catholic Charities.

The Fredericksburg Catholic Charities office has continued aiding current clients and operating with minimal layoffs thanks to its diocese’s support and state funds. But it’s unclear what the local agency’s future will be without federal funding or arriving refugees.

“I’ll just keep praying,” Renfroe said. “It’s all I can do from my end.”

A legacy of faith-based service

Religious groups have long been at the heart of U.S. refugee resettlement work. Until the recent policy changes, seven out of the 10 national organizations that partnered with the U.S. government to resettle refugees were faith-based. They were aided by hundreds of local affiliates and religious congregations.

Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington has been working with refugees for 50 years, starting with Vietnamese people after the fall of Saigon. For the last 10 years, most of its clients have been Afghans, with an influx arriving in 2021 after the Taliban returned to power.

Area faith groups like Renfroe’s large church — St. Mary’s in Fredericksburg — have been key to helping Afghan newcomers get on their feet. Volunteers from local congregations furnish homes, provide meals and drive families to appointments.

“As a church, we care deeply. As Christians, we care deeply,” said Joi Rogers, who led the Afghan ministry at her Southern Baptist church. “As military, we also just have an obligation to them as people that committed to helping the U.S. in our mission over there.”

Rogers’ husband, Jake, a former Marine, is one of the pastors at Pillar, a network of 16 Southern Baptist churches that minister to military members. Their flagship location is near Quantico, the Marine base in northern Virginia, where nearly 5,000 Afghans were evacuated to after the fall of Kabul.

With Southern Baptist relief funds, Pillar Church hired Joi Rogers to work part time as a volunteer coordinator in the base’s makeshift refugee camp in 2021. She helped organize programming, including children’s activities. Her position was under the auspices of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which the government contracted to help run the camp.

For Pillar’s founding pastor, Colby Garman, the effort was an easy decision. “It was affecting so many of the lives of our families here who had served in Afghanistan.”

“We’ve been told to love God and love our neighbor,” Garman said. “I said to our people, this is an opportunity, a unique opportunity, for us to demonstrate love for our neighbor.”

Christians called to care for refugees, politics aside

Within five months, as the Afghans left the base for locations around the country, the support at the camp transitioned to the broader community. Pillar started hosting an English class. Church members visited locally resettled families and tried to keep track of their needs.

For one Pillar Church couple in nearby Stafford, Va., that meant opening their home to a teenager who had arrived alone in the U.S. after being separated from her family at the Kabul airport — a situation they heard about through the church.

Katlyn Williams and her husband Phil Williams, then an active-duty Marine, served as foster parents for Mahsa Zarabi, now 20, during her junior and senior years of high school. They introduced her to many American firsts: the beach, homecoming, learning to drive.

“The community was great,” Zarabi said. “They welcomed me very well.”

She attends college nearby; the Williamses visit her monthly. During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this spring, they broke fast with her and her family, now safely in Virginia.

“She has and will always be part of our family,” Katlyn Williams said.

Her friend Joi Rogers, while careful not to speak for Pillar, said watching the recent dismantling of the federal refugee program has “been very hard for me personally.”

Veterans and members of the military tend to vote Republican. Most Southern Baptists are among Trump’s staunch white evangelical supporters. For those reasons, Pillar pastor Garman knows it may be surprising to some that his church network has been steadfast in supporting refugees.

“I totally understand that is the case, but I think that is a bias of just not knowing who we are and what we do,” Garman said after a recent Sunday service.

Later, sitting in the church office with his wife, Jake Rogers said, “We recognize that there are really faithful Christians that could lie on either side of the issue of refugee policy.”

“Regardless of your view on what our national stance should be on this,” he said, “we as Christ followers should have a heart for these people that reflects God’s heart for these people.”

Unity through faith and refugee work

Later that week, nearly two dozen Afghan women gathered around a table at the Fredericksburg refugee office, while children played with toys in the corner. The class topic was self-care, led by an Afghan staff member. Along the back wall waited dishes of rice and chicken, part of a celebratory potluck to mark the end of Ramadan.

Sitting at the front was Suraya Qaderi, the last client to arrive at the resettlement agency before the U.S. government suspended new arrivals.

She was in Qatar waiting to be cleared for a flight to the United States when the Trump administration started canceling approved travel plans for refugees. “I was one of the lucky last few,” said Qaderi, who was allowed to proceed.

She arrived in Virginia on Jan. 24, the day the administration sent stop-work orders to resettlement agencies.

Qaderi worked for the election commission in Afghanistan, and she received a special immigrant visa for her close ties to the U.S. government. She was a child when her father disappeared under the previous Taliban regime.

The return of the Taliban government was like “the end of the world,” she said. As a woman, she lost many of her rights, including her ability to work and leave home unaccompanied.

She studied Islamic law during her university years. She believes the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam is wrong on the rights of women. “Islam is not only for them,” she said.

The resettlement office includes not only Catholic staffers, but many Muslim employees and clients. “We find so much commonality between our faiths,” Renfroe said.

Her Catholic faith guides her work, and it’s sustaining her through the uncertainty of what the funding and policy changes will mean for her organization, which remains committed to helping refugees.

“I’m happy to go back to being a volunteer again if that’s what it takes,” Renfroe said.

Regardless of government contracts, she wants local refugee families to know “that we’re still here, that we care about them and that we want to make sure that they have what they need.”

Stanley writes for the Associated Press.

In May 1939, a ship called the St. Louis departed from Hamburg, Germany, with 937 passengers, most of them Jews fleeing the Holocaust. They had been promised disembarkation rights in Cuba, but when the ship reached Havana, the government refused to let it dock. The passengers made desperate pleas to the U.S., including directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to allow them entry. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department wired back that they should “wait their turn” and enter legally.

As if that were a realistic option available to them.

After lingering off the coast of Florida hoping for a merciful decision from Washington, the St. Louis and its passengers returned to Europe, where the Nazis were on the march. Ultimately, 254 of the ship’s passengers died in the Holocaust.

In response to this shameful failure to provide protection, the nations of the world came together and drafted an international treaty to protect those fleeing persecution. The treaty, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and its 1967 Protocol, has been ratified by more than 75% of nations, including the United States.

Because the tragedy of the St. Louis was fresh in the minds of the treaty drafters, they included an unequivocal prohibition on returning fleeing refugees to countries where their “life or freedom would be threatened.” This is understood to prohibit sending them to a country where they would face these threats, as well as sending them to a country that would then send them on to a third country where they would be at such risk.

All countries that are parties to the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees are bound by this prohibition on return (commonly referred to by its French translation, “nonrefoulement”). In the U.S., Congress enacted the 1980 Refugee Act, expressly adopting the treaty language. The U.S. is also a party to the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits the return of individuals to places where they would be in danger of “being subjected to torture.”

In both Trump administrations, there have been multiple ways in which the president has attempted to eviscerate and undermine the protections guaranteed by treaty obligation and U.S. law. The most drastic among these measures have been the near-total closure of the border to asylum seekers and the suspension of entry of already approved and vetted refugees.

However, none of these measures has appeared so clearly designed to make a mockery of the post-World War II refugee protection framework as the administration’s proposals and attempts to send migrants from the U.S. to Libya and Rwanda.

Although there are situations in which the U.S. could lawfully send a migrant to a third country, it would still be bound by the obligation not to return the person to a place where their “life or freedom would be threatened.” The choices of Libya and Rwanda — rather than, for example, Canada or France — can only be read as an intentional and open flouting of that prohibition.

Libya is notorious for its abuse of migrants, with widespread infliction of torture, sexual violence, forced labor, starvation and slavery. Leading advocacy groups such as Amnesty International call it a “hellscape.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has stated in no uncertain terms that Libya is not to be considered a safe third country for migrants. The U.S. is clearly aware of conditions there; the State Department issued its highest warning level for Libya, advising against travel to Libya because of crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict.

Although conditions in Rwanda are not as extreme, the supreme courts of both Israel and the United Kingdom have ruled that agreements to send migrants to Rwanda are unlawful. The two countries had attempted to outsource their refugee obligations by calling Rwanda a “safe third country” to which asylum seekers could be sent to apply for protection.

Israel and the U.K.’s highest courts found that Rwanda — contrary to its stated commitment when entering these agreements — had in fact refused to consider the migrants’ asylum claims, and instead, routinely expelled them, resulting in their return to countries of persecution, in direct violation of the prohibition on refoulement. The U.K. court also cited Rwanda’s poor human rights record, including “extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture.”

If the Trump administration had even a minimal commitment to abide by its international and domestic legal obligations, plans to send migrants to Libya or Rwanda would be a nonstarter. But the plans are very much alive, and it is not far-fetched to assume that their intent is to further undermine internationally agreed upon norms of refugee protection dating to World War II. Why else choose the two countries that have repeatedly been singled out for violating the rights of refugees?

As in Israel and the U.K., there will be court challenges should the U.S. move forward with its proposed plan of sending migrants to Libya and Rwanda. It is hard to imagine a court that could rule that the U.S. would not be in breach of its legal obligation of nonrefoulement by delivering migrants to these two countries.

Having said that, and despite the clear language of the treaty and statute, it has become increasingly difficult to predict how the courts will rule when the Supreme Court has issued decisions overturning long-accepted precedent, and lower courts have arrived at diametrically opposed positions on some of the most contentious immigration issues.

In times like these, we should not depend solely on the courts. There are many of us here in the U.S. who believe that the world’s refugee framework — developed in response to the profound moral failure of turning back the St. Louis — is worth fighting for. We need to take a vocal stand. The clear message must be that those fleeing persecution should never be returned to persecution.

If we take such a stand, we will be in the good company of those who survived the Holocaust and continue to speak out for the rights of all refugees.

Karen Musalo is a law professor and the founding director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Law, San Francisco. She is also lead co-author of “Refugee Law and Policy: A Comparative and International Approach.”

In 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, as a record 1.3 million people, mostly Syrians fleeing civil war, sought asylum, Pau Aleikum Garcia was in Athens, helping those arriving in the Greek capital after a perilous sea journey.

The then 25-year-old Spanish volunteer arranged housing for refugees in abandoned facilities like schools and libraries, and set up community kitchens, language classes and art activities.

“It was kind of a massive cascade of people,” Garcia recalls.

“My own memory of that time is oddly patchy,” he admits. Though there was one encounter that stood out.

In one of those schools in Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood, where refugees painted the external wall to illustrate their memories of their journeys, Garcia met a Syrian woman in her late 70s.

“I’m not afraid of being a refugee. I have lived all my life. I’m happy with what I have lived,” he recalls her telling him. “I’m afraid that my grandkids will be refugees for all their life.”

When he tried to reassure her that they would find a place to start anew, she protested: “No, no, I’m worried, because when my grandkids grow [up] and they ask themselves, ‘Where do I come from?’ they won’t be able to answer that question.”

The woman told him how, during the family’s journey to Greece, all but one of their photo albums were lost.

Now, she said, all the memories of their lives in Syria existed only in her and her husband’s minds, unrecorded and unrecoverable for the next generation.

Connecting generations

The woman’s story stayed with Garcia after he returned to Barcelona and his work as cofounder of the design studio, Domestic Data Streamers (DDS).

Over the years, the studio has grown into a 30-person team of experts in varied disciplines such as psychology, architecture, cognitive science, journalism and design. The studio has collaborated with diverse institutions such as museums, prisons and churches, as well as the likes of the United Nations, and uses technology to bring “emotions and humanity” to data visualisation.

Then, in around 2019, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence – a model of machine learning that uses algorithms to create new content from data scraped from the internet – the team began to explore image-generating technology, following the release of ChatGPT.

As they did, Garcia thought of the grandmother from Syria and how this technology might help someone like her by constructing images based on memories.

He believes that memories – captured through records like photographs – play an integral role in connecting generations.

“Memories are the architects of who we are. … It’s a big part of how social identities are built,” he says.

He also likes to cite Montserrat Roig, a Catalan author, who wrote that the biggest act of love is to remember something.

But in the past, people had fewer opportunities to document their lives than their mobile phone-wielding contemporaries, he says. Many experiences have been omitted or erased from collective memory due to lack of access, persecution, censorship or marginalisation.

So with this in mind, in 2022, Garcia and his team launched the Synthetic Memories project to use AI to generate photographic representations of memories that were lost, due to missing photos, for instance, or never recorded in the first place.

“I don’t think there was an eureka moment,” Garcia says of the evolution of the idea. “I’ve always been intrigued by how documentaries reconstruct the past … our goal and approach were more focused on the subjective and personal side, trying to capture the emotional layers of memory.”

For Garcia, the chance to recover such memories is an important act in reclaiming one’s past. “The fact that you have an image that tells this happened to me, this is my memory, and this is shown and other people can see it, is also a way to say to you, ‘Yes, this happened’. It’s a way of saying, of having more dignity about the part of your history that has not been depicted.”

Building memories

To create a synthetic memory, DDS uses open-source image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Flux, while the team is developing its own tool.

The process starts with an interviewer asking a subject to recall their earliest memory. They explore various narratives as people recount their life stories before picking the one they think can be best encapsulated in an image.

The interviewer works with a prompter – someone trained in the syntax that the AI uses to create visuals – who inputs specific words to build the image from the details described by the interviewee.

Nearly everything, such as hairstyles, clothing, and furniture, is recreated as accurately as possible. However, figures themselves are usually depicted from behind or, if faces are shown, with a degree of blurriness.

This is intentional. “We want to be very clear that this is a synthetic memory and this is not real photography,” says Garcia. This is partly because they want to ensure their generated images don’t add to the proliferation of fake photos on the internet.

The resulting images – usually two or three from each session, which can last up to an hour – can appear dreamlike and undefined.

“As we know, memory is very, very, very fragile and full of imperfections,” Garcia explains. “That was the other reason why we wanted a model that could be full of imperfections and also a bit fragile, so it’s a good demonstration of how our memory works.”

Garcia’s team found that people who took part in the project said they felt a stronger connection to less detailed images, their suggestive nature allowing for their imagination to fill in the blanks. The higher the resolution, the more someone focuses on the details, losing that emotional connection to the image, Airi Dordas, the project’s lead, explains.

The team first trialled this technology with their grandparents. The experience was moving, Garcia says, and one that grew into medical trials to determine whether synthetic memories can be used as an augmentation tool in reminiscence therapy for dementia sufferers.

From there, the team went on to work with Bolivian and Korean communities in Brazil to tell their stories of migration, before partnering with Barcelona’s city council to document local memories. The sessions were open to the public and held last summer at the Design Museum in Barcelona, generating more than 300 memories.

Some wanted to work through traumatic experiences, like one woman who was abused by a relative who avoided jail and wanted to recreate a memory of him in court to share with her family. Others recalled moments from their childhood, like 105-year-old Pepita, who recreated the day she saw a train for the first time. Couples came to relive shared experiences.

There was always a moment, Ainoa Pubill Unzeta, who carried out interviews in Barcelona, says, “when people actually saw a picture that they would relate to, you could feel it … you can see it”. For some, it was just a smile; others cried. For her, this was confirmation that the image was done well.

One of the first memories Garcia recorded during their pilot sessions was that of Carmen, now in her 90s. She remembers going up to a stranger’s balcony as a child, her mother having paid the owners to let them in, because it looked into the courtyard of the jail where her father, a doctor for the Republican front during the Spanish Civil War, was being held. This was the only way the family could see him from his cell window.

By incredible coincidence, Carmen’s son was employed in the same prison as a social worker decades later, but neither son nor mother knew that. When the whole family came to see an installation at the Public Office of Synthetic Memories last year, her son recognised the prison immediately from his mother’s reconstruction. “It was a kind of closing the loop … it was beautiful,” Garcia says.

Clandestine assemblies

The team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.

One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.

Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression under General Francisco Franco, Vallejo came of age during one of Europe’s longest dictatorships, which lasted from 1939 to 1975. During the civil war of 1936-39, and following the defeat of the Republican forces by Franco’s Nationalists, enforced disappearances, forced labour, torture and extrajudicial killings claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people.

Vallejo became involved in opposition to the fascist regime first at university, where he attempted to organise a democratic student union, and then as a young worker at Barcelona’s SEAT automobile factory.

He recalls an atmosphere of fear, with most people terrified of speaking out against the authoritarian government. “That fear sprang from the terrible defeat in the Spanish Civil War and from the many deaths that occurred during the war, but also from the harsh repression from the post-war period up to the end of the dictatorship,” he explains.

Informants were everywhere, and the circle of trusted individuals was small. “As you can imagine, this is no way to live – this was living in darkness, silence, fear, and repression,” Vallejo says.

“There were few of us – very few – who dared to move from silence to activism, which involved many risks.”

Vallejo was imprisoned in 1970 for attempting to set up a labour union among SEAT employees, spending half a year in jail, including 20 days being tortured by Barcelona’s secret police. After another arrest in late 1971 and the prosecution demanding 20 years for what were then considered crimes of association, organisation and propaganda, Vallejo crossed the border with France in January 1972. He ultimately gained political asylum in Italy, where he lived in exile before returning to Spain following the first limited amnesty of 1976, which granted pardons to political prisoners after Franco’s death in 1975.

Today, Vallejo dedicates his time to human rights activism. He presides over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, created in the final years of the dictatorship.

He learned about synthetic memories through Iridia, a human rights organisation that collaborated with DDS to help visualise memories of police abuse victims during the regime in a central Barcelona police station.

Vallejo was drawn to the project, curious about how the technology might be applied to capturing resistance activities too dangerous to record during Franco’s rule.

In 1970, SEAT workers organised clandestine breakfasts in the woods of Vallvidrera. On Sunday mornings, disguised as hikers, they would make their way through the dense forests surrounding the Catalan capital to discuss the struggle against the dictatorship.

“I think I must have been to more than 10 or 15 of these forest gatherings,” Vallejo recalls. Other times, they met in churches. No records of these exist.

Vallejo’s synthetic memory of these meetings is in black and white. The image is vague, almost like someone has taken an eraser to it to blur the details. But it is still possible to make out the scene: a crowd of people gathered in a forest. Some sit, others stand beneath a canopy of trees.

Looking at the image, Vallejo says he felt transported to the clandestine assemblies in the Barcelona woods, where as many as 50 or 60 people would gather in a tense atmosphere.

“I found myself truly immersed in the image,” he says.

“It was like entering a kind of time tunnel,” he adds.

Vallejo suffered memory loss around the ordeal of his arrests, imprisonment and torture.

The process of creating the image provided “a feeling – not exactly of relief – but rather of reconciling memory with the past and perhaps also of filling that void created by selective amnesia, which results from complicated, traumatic, and above all, distant experiences”. He found the reconstruction a “valuable experience” that helped him process some of these events.

‘We are not reconstructing the past’

Emphasising that memory is subjective, Garcia says, “One of the things that we are kind of drawing a very big red line about is historical reconstruction.”

This is partly due to the drawbacks of AI, which reinforces cultural and other biases in the data it draws from.

David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom centre for data science and AI, cautions that using data that was initially biased against marginalised groups could create revisionist histories or false memories for those communities. Nor can “simply generating something from AI” help to remedy or reclaim historical narratives, he insists.

For DDS, “It is never about the bigger story. We are not reconstructing the past,” Garcia explains.

“When we talk about history, we talk about one truth that somehow we are committed to,” he elaborates. But while synthetic memories can depict a part of the human experience that history books cannot, these memories come from the individual, not necessarily what transpired, he underlines.

The team believes synthetic memories could not only help communities whose memories are at risk but also create dialogue between cultures and generations.

They plan to set up “emergency” memory clinics in places where cultural heritage is in danger of being eroded by natural disasters, such as in southern Brazil, which was last year hit by floods. There are also hopes to make their finished tool freely available to nursing homes.

But Garcia wonders what place the project could have in a future where there is an “over-registration” of everything that happens. “I have 10 images of my father when he was a kid,” he says. “I have over 200 when I was a kid. But my friend, of her daughter, [has] 25,000, and she’s five years old!”

“I think the problem of memory image will be another one, which will be that we are … [overwhelmed] and we cannot find the right image to tell us the story,” he muses.

Yet in the present moment, Vallejo believes the project has a role to play in helping younger generations understand past injustices. Forgetting serves no purpose for activists like himself, he believes, while memory is like “a weapon for the future”.

Instead of trying to numb the past, “I think it is more therapeutic – both collectively and individually – to remember rather than to forget.”

Their situation seemed desperate; their demeanour, portrayed in several videos published by news outlets, was sour.

On a recent weekday in March, men, women, and even children – all with their belongings heaped on their heads or strapped to their bodies – disembarked from the ferry they say they were forcibly hauled onto from the vast northwest African nation of Mauritania to the Senegalese town of Rosso, on the banks of the Senegal River.

Their offence? Being migrants from the region, they told reporters, regardless of whether they had legal residency papers.

“We suffered there,” one woman told France’s TV5 Monde, a baby perched on her hip. “It was really bad.”

The deportees are among hundreds of West Africans who have been rounded up by Mauritanian security forces, detained, and sent over the border to Senegal and Mali in recent months, human rights groups say.

According to one estimate from the Mauritanian Association for Human Rights (AMDH),1,200 people were pushed back in March alone, even though about 700 of them had residence permits.

Those pushed back told reporters about being randomly approached for questioning before being arrested, detained for days in tight prison cells with insufficient food and water, and tortured. Many people remained in prison in Mauritania, they said.

The largely desert country – which has signed expensive deals with the European Union to keep migrants from taking the risky boat journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Western shores – has called the pushbacks necessary to crack down on human smuggling networks.

However, its statements have done little to calm rare anger from its neighbours, Mali and Senegal, whose citizens make up a huge number of those sent back.

Mali’s government, in a statement in March, expressed “indignation” at the treatment of its nationals, adding that “the conditions of arrest are in flagrant violation of human rights and the rights of migrants in particular.”

In Senegal, a member of parliament called the pushbacks “xenophobic” and urged the government to launch an investigation.

“We’ve seen these kinds of pushbacks in the past but it is at an intensity we’ve never seen before in terms of the number of people deported and the violence used,” Hassan Ould Moctar, a migration researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, told Al Jazeera.

The blame, the researcher said, was largely to be put on the EU. On one hand, Mauritania was likely under pressure from Brussels, and on the other hand, it was also likely reacting to controversial rumours that migrants deported from Europe would be resettled in the country despite Nouakchott’s denial of such an agreement.

Is Mauritania the EU’s external border?

Mauritania, on the edge of the Atlantic, is one of the closest points from the continent to Spain’s Canary Islands. That makes it a popular departure point for migrants who crowd the coastal capital, Nouakchott, and the commercial northern city of Nouadhibou. Most are trying to reach the Canaries, a Spanish enclave closer to the African continent than to Europe, from where they can seek asylum.

Due to its role as a transit hub, the EU has befriended Nouakchott – as well as the major transit points of Morocco and Senegal – since the 2000s, pumping funds to enable security officials there to prevent irregular migrants from embarking on the crossing.

However, the EU honed in on Mauritania with renewed vigour last year after the number of people travelling from the country shot up to unusual levels, making it the number one departure point.

About 83 percent of the 7,270 people who arrived in the Canaries in January 2024 travelled from Mauritania, migrant advocacy group Caminando Fronteras (CF) noted in a report last year. That number represented a 1,184 percent increase compared with January 2023, when most people were leaving Senegal. Some 3,600 died on the Mauritania-Atlantic route between January and April 2024, CF noted.

Analysts, and the EU, link the surge to upheavals wracking the Sahel, from Mali to Niger, including coups and attacks by several armed groups looking to build caliphates. In Mali, attacks on local communities by armed groups and government forces suspicious of locals have forced hundreds over the border into Mauritania in recent weeks.

Ibrahim Drame of the Senegalese Red Cross in the border town of Rosso told Al Jazeera the migrant raids began in January after a new immigration law went into force, requiring a residence permit for any foreigner living on Mauritanian soil. However, he said most people have not had an opportunity to apply for those permits. Before this, nationals of countries like Senegal and Mali enjoyed free movement under bilateral agreements.

“Raids have been organised day and night, in large markets, around bus stations, and on the main streets,” Drame noted, adding that those affected are receiving dwindling shelter and food support from the Red Cross, and included migrants from Togo, Nigeria, Niger, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Benin.

“Hundreds of them were even hunted down in their homes or workplaces, without receiving the slightest explanation … mainly women, children, people with chronic illnesses in a situation of extreme vulnerability and stripped of all their belongings, even their mobile phones,” Drame said.

Last February, European Commission head, Ursula von der Leyen, visited President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani in Nouakchott to sign a 210 million euro ($235m) “migrant partnership agreement”. The EU said the agreement was meant to intensify “border security cooperation” with Frontex, the EU border agency, and dismantle smuggler networks. The bloc has promised an additional 4 million euros ($4.49m) this year to provide food, medical, and psychosocial support to migrants.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was also in Mauritania in August to sign a separate border security agreement.

Fear and pain from a dark past

Black Mauritanians in the country, meanwhile, say the pushback campaign has awakened feelings of exclusion and forced displacement carried by their communities. Some fear the deportations may be directed at them.

Activist Abdoulaye Sow, founder of the US-based Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the US (MNHRUS), told Al Jazeera that to understand why Black people in the country feel threatened, there’s a need to understand the country’s painful past.

Located at a confluence where the Arab world meets Sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritania has historically been racially segregated, with the Arab-Berber political elite dominating over the Black population, some of whom were previously, or are still, enslaved. It was only in 1981 that Mauritania passed a law abolishing slavery, but the practice still exists, according to rights groups.

Dark-skinned Black Mauritanians are composed of Haratines, an Arabic-speaking group descended from formerly enslaved peoples. There are also non-Arabic speaking groups like the Fulani and Wolof, who are predominantly from the Senegal border area in the country’s south.

Black Mauritanians, Sow said, were once similarly deported en masse in trucks from the country to Senegal. It dates back to April 1989, when simmering tensions between Mauritanian herders and Senegalese farmers in border communities erupted and led to the 1989-1991 Border War between the two countries. Both sides deployed their militaries in heavy gunfire battles. In Senegal, mobs attacked Mauritanian traders, and in Mauritania, security forces cracked down on Senegalese nationals.

Because a Black liberation movement was also growing at the time, and the Mauritanian military government was fearful of a coup, it cracked down on Black Mauritanians, too.

By 1991, there were refugees on either side in the thousands. However, after peace came about, the Mauritanian government expelled thousands of Black Mauritanians under the guise of repatriating Senegalese refugees. Some 60,000 people were forced into Senegal. Many lost important citizenship and property documents in the process.

“I was a victim too,” Sow said. “It wasn’t safe for Blacks who don’t speak Arabic. I witnessed armed people going house to house and asking people if they were Mauritanian, beating them, even killing them.”

Sow said it is why the deportation of sub-Saharan migrants is scaring the community. Although he has written open letters to the government warning of how Black people could be affected, he said there has been no response.

“When they started these recent deportations again, I knew where they were going, and we’ve already heard of a Black Mauritanian deported to Mali. We’ve been sounding the alarm for so long, but the government is not responsive.”

The Mauritanian government directed Al Jazeera to an earlier statement it released regarding the deportations, but did not address allegations of possible forced expulsions of Black Mauritanians.

In the statement, the government said it welcomed legal migrants from neighbouring countries, and that it was targeting irregular migrants and smuggling networks.

“Mauritania has made significant efforts to enable West African nationals to regularise their residence status by obtaining resident cards following simplified procedures,” the statement read.

Although Mauritania eventually agreed to take back its nationals between 2007 and 2012, many Afro-Mauritanians still do not have documents proving their citizenship as successive administrations implement fluctuating documentation and census laws. Tens of thousands are presently stateless, Sow said. At least 16,000 refugees chose to stay back in Senegal to avoid persecution in Mauritania.

Sow said the fear of another forced deportation comes on top of other issues, including national laws that require students in all schools to learn in Arabic, irrespective of their culture. Arabic is Mauritania’s lingua franca, but Afro-Mauritanians who speak languages like Wolof or Pula are against what they call “forced Arabisation”. Sow says it is “cultural genocide”.

Despite new residence permit laws in place, Sow added, migrants, as well as the Black Mauritanian population, should be protected.

“Whether they are migrants or not, they have their rights as people, as humans,” he said.

Johannesburg, South Africa – On a chilly Sunday evening in Johannesburg, OR Tambo International Airport was filled with tourists and travellers entering and exiting South Africa’s busiest airport.

On one side of the international departures hall, a few dozen people queued – their trollies piled with luggage, travel pillows and children’s blankets – as they waited to board a charter flight to Washington Dulles International Airport in the United States.

Dressed casually and comfortably for the 13-hour journey that would follow, the group – most young, all white – talked among themselves while avoiding onlookers. Although they blended into the bustling terminal around them, these weren’t ordinary travellers. They were Afrikaners leaving South Africa to be refugees in Donald Trump’s America.

When Charl Kleinhaus first applied for refugee resettlement in the US earlier this year, he told officials he had been threatened and that people attempted to claim his property.

The 46-year-old, who claimed to own a farm in Limpopo, South Africa’s northernmost province, was not required to present proof of these threats or provide details regarding when the alleged incidents occurred.

On Sunday, he joined dozens of others accepted by the Trump administration as part of a pilot programme granting asylum to people from the Afrikaner community – descendants of mainly Dutch colonisers that led the brutal apartheid regime for nearly five decades.

The Trump administration claims white people face discrimination in South Africa – a country where they make up some 7 percent of the population but own more than 70 percent of the land and occupy the majority of top management positions.

“I want you all to know that you are really welcome here and that we respect what you have had to deal with these last few years,” US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told Kleinhaus and the others when they landed at the Dulles International in Virginia.

“We respect the long tradition of your people and what you have accomplished over the years,” he said on Monday.

Speaking to a journalist at the airport, Kleinhaus said he never expected “this land expropriation thing to go so far” in South Africa.

He was referring to the recently passed Expropriation Act, which allows the South African government to, in exceptional circumstances, take land for public use without compensation. Pretoria says the measure is aimed at redressing apartheid injustices, as Black South Africans who make up more than 80 percent of the population still own just 4 percent of the land.

South African officials say the law has not resulted in any land grabs. There is also no record of Kleinhaus’s property being expropriated.

Kleinhaus was unaffected by any threats and the government was unaware of anyone who might have threatened his property, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni told Al Jazeera.

“The people of South Africa have not been affected by the expropriation of land. There’s no evidence. None of them are affected by any farm murders either,” the minister emphasised.

Discredited ‘genocide’ claims

In February, when Trump signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners, he cited widely discredited claims that their land was being seized and that they were being brutally killed in South Africa.

On Monday, Trump again claimed that Afrikaners were victims of a “genocide” – an accusation South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other experts maintain is based on lies.

“Farmers are being killed,” Trump told reporters. “White farmers are being brutally killed, and the land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

Ramaphosa has also debunked claims that the group who left this week faced any persecution at home.

“They are leaving because they do not wish to embrace the democratic transformation unfolding in South Africa,” he said.

For 60-year-old Sam Busa, watching Kleinhaus and the 48 other South Africans leave to be resettled in the US was a hopeful moment.

Busa, who has also applied for asylum, is waiting in anticipation for an interview that would qualify her for resettlement. She has begun selling excess household items in anticipation of her new life in the US.

The semi-retired businesswoman has been at the forefront of efforts – through a website called Amerikaners – encouraging Afrikaners to take an interest in the US offer to grant refugee status on the grounds that they face racial persecution in South Africa.

When asked how she has experienced persecution because of her race, Busa recounted an incident where she was held at gunpoint at her home in Johannesburg – the commercial capital of South Africa and one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

She later moved to KwaZulu-Natal on the country’s east coast, where she ran a business that provided services to the government.

When asked whether she believed she was targeted because of her race or if she was simply a victim of common crime, Busa asserted it did not matter.

She didn’t feel safe, she said. “I am not overly sensitive. When I watch Julius Malema singing about killing the Boer, it is extremely terrifying.”

Malema, the far-left leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party, often sings a famous anti-apartheid song, Kill the Boer (Boer meaning farmer in Afrikaans), which the courts have ruled is not hate speech or an incitement to violence.

‘Persecution’

For Busa, much like Kleinhaus, new legislation passed to bolster racial transformation, which includes having specific hiring targets for employment equity, has been “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

“Expropriation without compensation is a huge issue, along with the amendment to employment equity,” she said, restating her belief that white people don’t have a future in South Africa.

“It’s coming hard and fast, and it’s becoming clear to [white] South Africans that we struggle with fears of home invasion. I don’t live on a farm, but there are massive fears because of the constant threat of crime. It has become clear to white South Africans; it’s not disguised,” she claimed.

The narrative of fear is prevalent among those engaged in the refugee programme despite the fact that several experts have debunked the assertion that they were victims of racially motivated attacks and not common crime.

South Africa sees about 19,000 murders a year. According to data from the police, most victims of rural crime are Black, with evidence showing that white farmers are not disproportionately being killed.

Meanwhile, many participants in the US’s Afrikaner refugee resettlement programme do not even live on farms; many are urban dwellers, according to Minister Ntshavheni.

Katia Beedan, who lives in Cape Town, is also anticipating resettlement in the US. She told Al Jazeera that refugee hopefuls do not have to prove racial persecution but simply articulate it.

“For me, it’s racial persecution and political persecution,” she said about her reasons for wanting to leave South Africa.

The copywriter-turned-life coach pointed to racial transformation laws targeting employment equity and land expropriation, which she believes the government is “overwhelming us with”, as a key reason for her desire to flee.

However, many other South Africans see sections of the Afrikaner community – including their right-wing lobby groups like AfriForum that first pushed the false narrative of a “white genocide” – as struggling to exist equally in a country where they were once considered superior because of their race.

“I think AfriForum is struggling with the reality of being ordinary,” social justice activist and South Africa’s former public protector, Thuli Madonsela, told local TV channel, Newzroom Afrika, in March.

“The new South Africa requires all of us to be ordinary, whereas colonialism and apartheid made white people special people.

“I think some white people … [are] seeking to reverse the wheel and find reason to be special again. They seem to have found an ally in the American president,” she said.

‘Absurd and ridiculous’

In February, as Trump expedited efforts to resettle Afrikaners in the US, he was closing off his country’s refugee programme to other asylum seekers from war-torn and famine-stricken parts of the world.

For Loren Landau from the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Afrikaner refugee relocation is “absurd and ridiculous”.

“They have not been welcomed as tourists or work permit holders, but as refugees. The idea of a refugee system is to protect those who cannot be safeguarded by their own states and who fear persecution or violence because of who they are or their membership in a social group. Can Afrikaners make that case?” he asked.

Although “there are people in South Africa who discriminate against them,” and Afrikaners now “have less privilege and protection than during the apartheid era”, it cannot be said that this is indicative of state policy, he said, adding that many different people are robbed, killed, and face discrimination in South Africa.

“Are they [Afrikaners] specially victimised because of who they are? Absolutely not!” Landau added.

He said all statistics on land ownership, income, and education levels indicate that South Africa’s white population far outstrips others: “They are still by far in the top strata of South African society. No one is taking their land. No one is taking their cars.”

Even fringe groups that may have called for land grabs have done little to enact their threats, observers note.

However, for Busa, that doesn’t matter. “I fear for my children. You never know when the EFF decides they want you dead. It’s not a country I want to live in,” she said. The EFF has said those who decide to leave South Africa should have their citizenship revoked.

Confronted with the implications of this situation, the government is considering whether those who exit as refugees could easily return to the country. Ramaphosa is expected to discuss the ongoing matter with Trump at a meeting in the US next week.

Meanwhile, for the Afrikaners now in the US, most will settle in Texas, with others in New York, Idaho, Iowa and North Carolina, while the government helps them find work and accommodation.

They will hold refugee status for one year, after which they can apply for a US green card to make them permanent residents. At the same time, the Afrikaner resettlement programme remains open to others who want to apply.

When Kleinhaus and his group arrived in the US on Monday, they had smiles on their faces as they met officials and waved US flags.

Yet, for South Africa’s president, their resettlement in the US marks “a sad moment for them” – and something he believes may not last.

“As South Africans, we are resilient. We don’t run away from our problems,” he said at an agricultural exhibition in Free State province on Monday.

“If you look at all national groups in our country, Black and white, they’ve stayed in this country because it’s our country.

“I can bet you that they [the Afrikaners who left] will be back soon because there is no country like South Africa.”

A group of white South Africans granted refugee status have arrived in the US. The Trump administration says white South Africans suffer oppression. The welcome for white South Africans contrasts with an aggressive deportation policy for other ethnic groups.

Loren Landau, a professor at Oxford University, explains the message the US Trump administration is trying to send to the world by granting some white South Africans refugee status. The first group of 49 people is set to land in Texas on May 12.

May 12 (UPI) — The first set of 49 White South African “Afrikaners” granted refugee status by President Donald Trump arrived in the United States on Monday.

The group departed Johannesburg on Sunday night on a private flight paid for by the U.S. government.

They arrived Monday in Washington at Dulles airport before being expatriated to multiple states, including Texas, Minnesota, Nevada and Idaho, where they will be on a pathway to U.S. citizenship and eligible for government benefits.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau welcomed the first group of Afrikaners, the State Department said.

“This tremendous accomplishment, at the direction of Secretary Rubio, responds to President Trump’s call to prioritize U.S. refugee resettlement of this vulnerable group facing unjust racial discrimination,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.

“No one should have to fear having their property seized without compensation or becoming the victim of violent attacks because of their ethnicity.”

Trump threatened in February to cut all U.S. funding to South Africa seemingly over its land expropriation law, which allows local, provincial and national authorities to confiscate land if it is in the public interest and in few specific cases without compensation.

The American president has claimed without evidence that South Africa is taking land from White Afrikaners, who Trump went on to claim were victims of “racial discrimination” and “large-scale killings.”

“Your case manager will pick you up from the airport and take you to housing that they have arranged for you,” read a document in part for the arriving South Africans. “This housing may be temporary (like a hotel) while a local organization helps you identify more long-term housing,” it added.

According to the South African government, it has not expropriated any land.

On Monday, South Africa Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said “there is no persecution of White Afrikaner South Africans,” adding how police reports debunked Trump’s false assertion.

The law states property cannot be expropriated arbitrarily and can only be seized if an agreement with the owner cannot be reached, subject to “just and equitable compensation” being paid.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s government said the Afrikaners, who are largely descended from Dutch settlers from the Netherlands in western Europe, wouldn’t be stopped from going, “albeit under a false narrative.”

“You are expected to support yourself quickly in finding work,” U.S. immigration documents said. “Adults are expected to accept entry-level employment in fields like warehousing, manufacturing, and customer service. You can work toward higher-level employment over time,” they were informed.

Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has accused Ramaphosa’s government of “openly pushing for genocide of white people” despite any evidence.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expelled South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S. Ebrahim Rasool for “race-baiting” following remarks accusing the United States of engaging in “supremacist” policies domestically and globally as South Africa has joined other nations in accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of committing acts of genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“There’s no legal or any factual basis for the executive order sanctioning this action,” Vincent Magwenya, a spokesman for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, told NPR after learning of the granting of refugee status.

“None of the provisions of international law on the definition of refugees are applicable in this case,” he said, adding that South Africa’s sovereignty as a country was being “grossly undermined and violated” by the U.S. in a way that was “disturbing.”

According to the World Bank, inequality is among the world’s highest in South Africa, which had segregationist policies via “apartheid” that only began to fully unravel in the early 1990s.

A 2017 land audit report found that White South Africans own 72% of all farm and agricultural land, while Black South Africans owned 15%.

As of 2022, White South Africans account for less than 8% of its population of more than 63 million.

Scores of South African civilians, meanwhile, took to social media to post comedic memes and videos expressing doubt over the plight of the Afrikaners, joking how they will miss “privileged lives, domestic workers and beach holidays.”

Max du Preez, a white Afrikaner author, told BBC that the claims of persecution of white South Africans were a “total absurdity” and “based on nothing.”

A U.S. government employee, while not authorized to speak to reporters, told NPR what they considered this was “immigration fraud” after the Trump administration effectively suspended America’s refugee admission program.