White Afrikaner Detained by ICE Learns Privilege Has Limits
A white Afrikaner detained by ICE after arriving in the United States is challenging assumptions about race, immigration, and privilege. Benjamin Schoonwinkel, a South African national, traveled to the U.S. on a tourist visa and requested asylum upon arrival, despite not qualifying under federal refugee rules. The case highlights how Trump-era rhetoric about white Afrikaners and immigration fueled false expectations, colliding with the realities of an enforcement system that routinely detains Black and brown immigrants without sympathy or exception.
Well, well, well — a white Afrikaner from South Africa thought he had an open invitation to enter the U.S. whenever and however he wanted because President Donald Trump has been lying about a “white genocide” in his country and making it clear that he only wants white immigrants in America. Now he’s sitting in a federal detention center in rural Georgia, wondering how his white privilege card got declined. `
Meet Benjamin Schoonwinkel. According to the New York Times, Schoonwinkel, 59, has spent more than three months in the detention center after he boarded a flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta in September, traveling on a tourist visa and telling U.S. border agents he was seeking asylum upon arrival, which isn’t the way Trump’s refugee program works, even for white people.
What really appears to have happened here is that a white man thought he was going to join the white flight movement from post-apartheid South Africa, and he let our white nationalist president gas him up into thinking he could just hop on a plane and call himself American.
Instead, he found himself locked up with a couple thousand brown people, and now he’s all confounded, because who knew ICE was out here running a reverse-DEI program for jail? According to Schoonwinkel, even his fellow inmates are confused about how this white man found himself on the wrong side of racist, xenophobic oppression.
“They all ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’” he said.
I guess it could be true that bewildered brown people are asking him that, or maybe it’s his own Caucasian confusion that he’s just projecting onto the non-whites he doesn’t believe he belongs among. Next month, Schoonwinkel is expected to find out when a hearing will be scheduled for him to present the merits of his case.
“This is the most winnable asylum case I have ever had,” his immigration lawyer, Marty Rosenbluth, told the Times. “All I have to do is present all of Trump’s rhetoric and everything his administration has been saying about South Africa.”
What he really means is that all he has to do is show the court how white his client is. And that’s not speculation either.
“I assumed he was Black. Why else would he be in ICE custody?” Rosenbluth said.
“It never crossed my mind he could be Afrikaner,” he continued, citing Trump’s executive order granting white Afrikaners, and only white Afrikaners, a get-in-the-U.S.-free card.
“The motivation behind the executive order makes it clear he should not have been detained for a minute,” he said. “He’s probably the only Afrikaner in immigration detention.”
It’s almost as if these people are fully aware of how privileged white people are across the globe, how racist the Trump administration is, and how white people, regardless of their ethnicity, are supposed to benefit from that racism. And they feel it’s some great injustice when they get treated similarly to the Black and brown people who are supposed to be oppressed.
Anyway, what are y’all having for dinner?
Zack Linly is a writer for NewsOne. Edited for length by Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.
This story was originally published on NewsOne, read full story here.