A Tacoma-based refugee resettlement agency is challenging the Trump administration’s preference for admitting white Afrikaner refugees, calling it a discriminatory" practice.
In an amended complaint filed Tuesday, Lutheran Community Services Northwest argued the Trump administration has unlawfully excluded all refugees except white Afrikaners and a few non-Black minorities from consideration for admission.
Over the last 14 months, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has transformed into a "discriminatory entity serving a 95% white population at the expense of refugees who have waited years for the chance to safely resettle in the United States,” Mevlüde Akay Alp, senior litigation attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which is representing the refugees and agencies, said in a statement.
The filing is the latest legal development in a string of court actions opposing President Donald Trump’s halting and overhaul of the country’s refugee resettlement program. When he suspended the program last year, he left thousands of refugees fleeing war or persecution in limbo, including some who already had plane tickets in hand to fly into the U.S.
Lutheran Community Services Northwest, along with two other refugee resettlement organizations and a number of affected refugees, sued the Trump administration in federal court February 2025 over the pause.
While a federal judge in Seattle found suspending admissions for refugees approved prior to Trump’s refugee ban was unlawful, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judge's preliminary injunction in a decision last month.
That ruling from the higher court left advocacy groups searching for a new legal pathway to help refugees impacted by Trump’s executive orders.
“Keeping families together and creating pathways for them to rebuild their lives reflects the best of who we are,” said David Duea, CEO of Lutheran Community Services Northwest, in a statement. “It’s time for federal policy to return to those values.”
Under Trump’s blanket refugee ban issued the day he returned to office, the entry of all refugees was suspended except for those admitted on a “case-by-case” basis.
In October, Trump set the cap on refugee admissions to 7,500, the lowest level since the program was established in 1980. Administration officials said those slots would primarily be allocated to white Afrikaners from South Africa, arguing they were persecuted because of their race.
While refugees hailing from majority nonwhite, non-European countries have historically spent years waiting to be processed, white Afrikaners were fast-tracked by the Trump administration, arriving to the U.S. in some cases within months.
The federal government has not released any information on the eligibility criteria for refugees seeking an exemption to the ban, the amended complaint states. But since October, more than 95% of the roughly 3,160 refugee admissions from South Africa granted by the Trump administration have been for white Afrikaners or other non-Black minorities, according to IRAP.
“This is not an aberration but design: Defendants have no intention of granting them an exception,” the amended complaint states.
A February report from Reuters indicated the U.S. State Department plans to eventually process up to 4,500 Afrikaners a month.
The group suing the Trump administration argues the government’s actions violate the equal-protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment by intentionally and illegally discriminating based on race, ethnicity, and national origin.
As part of the amended complaint, five new plaintiffs were added to the class action lawsuit. Among them is a man identified as Jalal, a naturalized citizen from Iraq whose brother remains stranded abroad after his February 2025 travel plan was canceled under Trump’s refugee ban.
Jalal “suffers with the knowledge that white Afrikaners designated as refugees are being permitted to enter the United States in a matter of months, while he remains painfully separated from his brother,” the amended complaint states.
"Before I came to America, I would always have nightmares … that ISIS was chasing me, but once I came here the dreams stopped," Jalal said in a statement Wednesday. "Now I’m having the dreams again, but this time they are about my brother.
A hearing date to review the amended complaint has not yet been scheduled.
Material from The Seattle Times archives was used in this report.
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