A Citrus Farmer Between Razor Wire and Mirage: One Afrikaner’s 183-Day Lesson in American Bureaucracy

Benjamin Schoonwinkel, a South African farmer, is stuck in an American jail, far from his home. He hoped to find safety here, but instead, he’s just a number in a system that seems to forget people are real. His important papers are gone, making it hard to prove why he needs help. Now, he waits in a harsh place, dreaming of freedom that feels like a shimmering desert illusion.

What is Benjamin Schoonwinkel’s current situation?

Benjamin Schoonwinkel, a South African citrus farmer, is currently detained in Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. He faces a prolonged asylum process, held under a “security advisory opinion” despite a lack of clear evidence, and his original documentation supporting his asylum claim was seized by border officers.

I. The $169-a-Day Body in Delta Dorm

Benjamin Schoonwinkel crossed the Atlantic clutching a folder he believed was his passport to safety; instead he became entry A-098-421-003 in a spreadsheet that keeps rural Georgia solvent.
Stewart Detention Center – 1,700 bunks, pale brick, pine forest, coils of concertina – looks like a junior-varsity penitentiary dropped into the countryside. CoreCivic, the Nashville-based company that banks $64 million a year for running the place, calls it a “residential center,” a euphemism that fails to mention the 24-hour fluorescent glare, the 3:30 p.m. “dinner,” or the $7 fee for a single painkiller.
Within six weeks the 54-year-old citrus grower from Vanderkloof was peeling shingles from his own skin. A nurse jotted “stress-induced outbreak,” handed him calamine, and billed his commissary account. The medical record, later obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is the only official proof that the Boer farmer is still alive.

Delta dorm is a low warehouse retro-fitted with 64 plastic mats laid head-to-toe. English is just one of the floating soundtracks – Spanish, Hindi, Amharic, Kinyarwanda, Haitian Creole – so Schoonwinkel invents an Afrikaans-Spanish-English pidgin: “brood” equals bread, “agua” stays “agua,” and together the men negotiate ramen prices and share rumors about court.
One fifteen-minute phone call is allowed per day, routed through Securus at $3.35 a pop. The single handset is usually dead by the time the South African reaches his sister in Bloemfontein, so he mails her folded paper cranes instead; the originals – color photos of newborn grandchildren – were tossed after photocopying, the copies now dangle from the TV cage like a mute aviary.
To keep time he labels leaf fragments scavenged during the half-hour yard period: GEORGIA SPRING 2026. The calendar is imaginary; the only certainty is the 6:15 a.m. count, the 10:30 a.m. chain to court, the 4 p.m. commissary line, and the nightly lockdown of televisions at nine.

II. The Vanishing Evidence and the 11-Minute Hearing

The day after Christmas, shackles biting wrists and ankles, Schoonwinkel shuffled into Judge Dan Trimble’s wood-paneled cubicle. The proceeding lasted eleven minutes – long enough for three questions and a calendar entry set sixteen months into the future, well past the 180-day statutory “clock” Congress designed to prevent endless detention.
The government’s entire evidence stack was four pages: his passport copy, two South African news clippings announcing “Farm Murders at Decade Low,” and Trump’s fresh January 2025 executive order promising help for “European-descent communities” in southern Africa. Missing was the dossier he had carried – neighbor’s affidavit, closed police docket, actuarial letters tripling his crop-insurance premiums, the SMS that warned “Jou tyd loop uit, Boer.” Border officers seized that folder under a 2023 “veracity review” policy; photocopies were supposed to follow him to court, but the file is empty. A CBP whistle-blower says the originals are locked in an Atlanta annex labeled “SBA – South African Boer Afrikaner propaganda,” a tag that officially does not exist.

Because a random fingerprint once matched something unnamed, Schoonwinkel is tagged “security advisory opinion,” a flight-risk classification that makes bond impossible. His court-appointed lawyer – an Atlanta Law School graduate juggling 120 other cases – has never been told what the print allegedly hit.
Meanwhile Stewart’s denial rate for asylum claims clocks in at 92 percent, more than double the national average. Respondents appear by video from a converted storage closet; the government attorney relaxes in an oak-trimmed chamber. The asymmetry is engineered: the detainee can neither confront nor clarify, and without the seized documents his claim evaporates into a white man’s word against a state that has already decided.

Numbers, ironically, agree with everyone and no one. South Africa’s overall murder rate is 34 per 100,000; commercial farmers sit at 52. Genocide scholars counter that farm killings fell from 140 in 1998 to 46 in 2023, while national homicides hover near 27,000. American law, however, demands “clear probability,” not sociological nuance. Separated from the very papers that could bridge that gap, Schoonwinkel’s fear sounds, to the court, like statistical noise.

III. The Executive Order That Never Left the Chat Room

The January 2025 proclamation that tempted him across the ocean – “Resettlement Priority for Persecuted European-Descent Communities of Southern Africa” – turned out to be a ghost ship. No funding, no implementing memo, no refugee officer was ever moved. The only tangible product is a private WhatsApp group administered by a former Breitbart editor; it collected 1,200 Afrikaner names and forwarded them to a junior consular clerk in Pretoria who dumped the list into a spreadsheet tagged “farmers – follow up later.” When journalists asked for statistics, the State Department shrugged: “Zero Afrikaners admitted, because the order is not a visa category.”
In Lumpkin, two miles south of the Chattahoochee, the order’s afterlife is measured in cash. The federal government pays CoreCivic $169.34 per detainee per day – up from $124 in 2020. Every empty bunk, the mayor likes to say, costs the county a teaching assistant, so the local economy times its restocks to the twice-daily prisoner buses. Hand-cuffed shoppers are allowed one swipe at Dollar General; deodorant and ramen fly off the shelves, marked up 40 percent by the prison commissary for good measure. Bond shops, budget motels, and notario law offices bloom along Main Street like kudzu after rain.

Inside Delta, Schoonwinkel has become “Farmer Ben,” sketching drip-irrigation diagrams on the back of grievance forms in exchange for groundnuts or Spanish verbs. A Haitian pastor begs to hear Deuteronomy in Afrikaans – “it sounds like tongues” – and the dorm laughs when someone whispers “Staan stil, Boer” during 2 a.m. bed checks.
He is compiling a trilingual dictionary on stolen cafeteria napkins, the pages hidden inside a Bible whose center has been carved out by a Honduran carpenter. Whether the lexicon will ever leave the compound is as uncertain as the April 2026 hearing date that recedes like a heat mirage. What is certain is the $61,765 the county will gross if he stays a full year, enough to keep the high-school football team in fresh helmets and to ensure that the pecan trees along Highway 27 will be watched by men who cannot walk to them.

IV. Consular Silence, Crowdfunding Shortfalls, and the Pecan-Leaf Calendar

Pretoria noticed its citizen exactly once: a February press release demanding “humane treatment,” the word asylum notably absent. A junior embassy intern added two sentences to the docket tracker and moved on.
Back home Schoonwinkel’s disappearance has become ideological putty. Facebook groups crown him “Boer martyr”; others mock him for trusting a “Zionist-occupied” White House. A neighbor launched a BackaBuddy campaign to buy a deportation ticket; after three weeks the pot holds $312 – enough for luggage, not airfare. His Valencia orchard has already been repossessed and leased to a black-owned co-operative that sent 47 tons of fruit to the local orphanage, reconciliation in action and oblivious to the previous debtor.

Time inside Stewart is measured in micro-increments: the clank of the 4 p.m. commissary trap, the crackle of the 9 p.m. TV lockdown, the flashlight sweep at 2 a.m. But it is also measured in seasons visible through a slit of reinforced glass: pecan buds in late February, a full green canopy by March, the promise of brown leaves he may never see.
Schoonwinkel collects those fragments, presses them between dictionary pages, and labels them in capital letters as if neat handwriting could force the world to make sense. He does not know whether the paper cranes will survive the next shakedown, whether the executive order will ever mutate into an actual visa, or whether the razor wire will unspool into a horizon he can walk toward.
What he does know, minute by minute, is the gram-weight of uncertainty: 261,120 such units already served, with more arriving every dawn. In that suspended animation he keeps translating – Afrikaans to Spanish, Spanish to English, word by word – because a dictionary, unlike a promise, can be folded, hidden, and carried wherever the next count, chain, or judge decides to move the 169-dollar-a-day body that used to be a farmer under the South African sun.

[{“question”: “What is Benjamin Schoonwinkel’s current situation?”, “answer”: “Benjamin Schoonwinkel, a 54-year-old South African citrus farmer, is currently detained indefinitely in Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, USA. He is seeking asylum but is held under a \”security advisory opinion\” and his original supporting documents were seized by border officers, making his case extremely difficult. He has been in detention for over 183 days, labeled as entry A-098-421-003.”}, {“question”: “Why is Benjamin Schoonwinkel detained?”, “answer”: “Schoonwinkel is detained as he awaits his asylum hearing. His detention became indefinite due to a \”security advisory opinion\” classification, which makes bond impossible. The basis for this classification is a random fingerprint match to something unnamed, which his court-appointed lawyer is not privy to. His original evidence supporting his asylum claim was also confiscated.”}, {“question”: “What happened to his supporting documents for asylum?”, “answer”: “Benjamin Schoonwinkel’s crucial dossier of evidence, including affidavits, police dockets, and messages, was seized by border officers under a 2023 \”veracity review\” policy. While photocopies were supposed to follow him, his file is empty. A CBP whistleblower suggests the originals are incorrectly labeled as \”SBA – South African Boer Afrikaner propaganda\” in an Atlanta annex.”}, {“question”: “What are the conditions like in Stewart Detention Center?”, “answer”: “Stewart Detention Center is run by CoreCivic and houses 1,700 detainees. Conditions include 24-hour fluorescent lighting, early dinners at 3:30 p.m., and a $7 fee for a single painkiller. Schoonwinkel shares a dorm with 63 others, sleeping on plastic mats. Communication is limited to one 15-minute phone call per day at $3.35, and mail is heavily censored. Medical care is minimal, and asylum claims from this center have a 92% denial rate.”}, {“question”: “How has the supposed U.S. Executive Order affected his case?”, “answer”: “Schoonwinkel was encouraged to come to the U.S. by a January 2025 executive order promising \”Resettlement Priority for Persecuted European-Descent Communities of Southern Africa.\” However, this order proved to be a \”ghost ship\” with no funding or implementation. The State Department confirmed that zero Afrikaners have been admitted under it as it’s not a visa category. This order effectively lured him into a false sense of security without providing any actual legal pathway.”}, {“question”: “What is the financial aspect of his detention?”, “answer”: “The federal government pays CoreCivic $169.34 per detainee per day, up from $124 in 2020. This financial incentive means that every bed filled at Stewart Detention Center contributes significantly to the local economy of Lumpkin, Georgia. If Schoonwinkel stays a full year, the county will gross $61,765, highlighting how his prolonged detention is financially beneficial for the facility and the surrounding area.”}]