In March 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that South Africa’s ambassador to the United States was being expelled. The announcement came in a post on X: “Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS. We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.” Just hours earlier, Rasool had spoken of Trump’s “supremacist” politics during a public webinar hosted by a South African-based think tank called the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection. He linked the administration’s focus on Afrikaners to support for anti-immigrant parties in Britain and Germany, saying, “Very clearly, it’s to project white victimhood as a dog whistle.” More than a year later, Rasool is watching another diplomatic deterioration as Rubio announces visa restrictions that could affect a broad swath of South African government officials.
The visa restrictions are the latest escalation in a bigger fight over how South Africa’s white minority is represented. A far-right narrative long promoted by Afrikaner interest groups and their American allies is now helping shape U.S. policy toward South Africa: that murders in rural farming communities amount to an organized campaign against white people — rather than one part of the national crime crisis in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world. Trump has falsely claimed that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa. Critics, including Rasool, argue that the Trump administration is using a narrative of white victimhood to advance its own politics at home. Washington is no longer merely amplifying that narrative. It is using it to justify preferential refuge for Afrikaners and threaten visa restrictions against people it holds responsible for policies it describes as discriminatory.
The visa restrictions, announced by Rubio on Sept. 15, target “foreign nationals who are responsible for, or complicit in, the enactment or implementation of laws or policies that enable uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination, and/or the incitement of imminent violence against members of minority ethnic or racial groups in South Africa.” The State Department announcement says certain family members could also be affected, without providing further detail.
In February 2025, President Trump directed officials to prioritize resettling Afrikaners as refugees, shortly after ordering an effective shutdown of the global U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. The move largely closed the U.S. refugee-resettlement system to people fleeing war and persecution elsewhere in the world, including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Sudan. Nearly 1,660 Afghans who had already been cleared for resettlement had their flights canceled.
From October 2025 through August 2026, the U.S. admitted 12,904 refugees: 12,901 South Africans and three Afghans, according to State Department figures. The administration did not simply give Afrikaners priority within a global refugee system. It shut down the broader system, then made an exception for a white minority whose alleged persecution Trump has falsely described as genocide. For refugees elsewhere, that route to safety in the U.S. remained closed.
Speaking to New Lines, Rasool said he’s not surprised by the punitive visa measures, which he’s been expecting since his own visa was revoked. He maintains his view that Trump traffics in the politics of supremacy and white victimhood: “Deportation of black and brown from the USA and an importation of white refugees from South Africa — I mean, it can’t be stronger than that.”
For Rasool, South Africa has a particular place in the American political imagination. He describes an “American constituency” formed through the anti-apartheid movement: people who marched, pressed lawmakers and campaigned for sanctions. In 1986, Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto to impose sanctions on the white-minority government. South Africa’s negotiated transition subsequently offered an image of multiracial coexistence that resonated far beyond its borders. Rasool sees that history as part of the present conflict. A country once invoked as evidence that reconciliation was possible is now presented by advocates of the genocide claim as a warning about the dangers facing whites under Black-majority rule.
The persecution narrative is contested within the Afrikaner community itself. Max du Preez, a journalist with a network called Afrikaners for South Africa, echoes Rasool’s critique. He rejects the idea that AfriForum and Solidarity, prominent organizations that campaign around Afrikaner interests, speak for all Afrikaners, and says the groups have engineered a resurgence of narrow Afrikaner nationalism. Some leading figures in these organizations “come from the far right before 1994,” du Preez says. Describing what he sees as their political reinvention, he says they “took off their khaki and their camouflage” and put on suits, forming organizations “that painted Afrikaners as victims.”
For du Preez, these disputes come back to whether or not people embrace and celebrate belonging in a pluralistic and diverse democratic South Africa. “Afrikaners are flourishing in this country,” he says.
The narrative of Afrikaner persecution is based in “absolute falsities,” Rasool says. In 2024, South African police recorded 26,232 murders nationwide, of which 44 were linked to farming communities and eight victims were farmers, Reuters reported in May 2025. The report also cited Afrikaner farmers’ union TLU-SA’s tally of 1,363 white farmers murdered since 1990: an average of 40 a year, “far less than 1% of total murders.”
The “farm murder” narrative distorts a more complex reality. South Africa as a whole suffers from staggering murder rates. In 2024, the daily average reached 72 people murdered a day. The geography of that violence matters. Crime researcher Lizette Lancaster has described its concentration in poor townships and urban neighborhoods populated predominantly by Black South Africans. In the final three months of that year alone, police recorded the murders of 961 women. Black South Africans are also among those killed on farms: Of six farm-murder victims recorded from January through March 2025, five were Black, including both farm owners, two employees and a manager. These deaths are obscured by a story about the country’s violence uniquely centered around white suffering, in which Black victims disappear from the account.
AfriForum has long campaigned on farm murders and sought support in Washington. In May 2018, its then deputy CEO Ernst Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. Carlson introduced it as a story “the media have all but ignored” and told viewers: “An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders.” That August, after another Carlson segment, Trump asked the State Department to investigate farm killings. The Southern Poverty Law Center condemned this as the mainstreaming of a white-nationalist conspiracy theory, warning that real killings were being recast as evidence of racial extermination and a warning to white people elsewhere.
Trump’s political orbit includes several prominent figures with ties to South Africa: PayPal veterans Elon Musk and David Sacks, both South African-born, and Peter Thiel, who spent part of his childhood in southern Africa. Musk, in particular, has publicly amplified claims of “white genocide.” Rasool contrasts Pretoria’s diplomatic access with that of well-connected South African expatriates: “We speak to the superpower over the phone. They are in the ear of the superpower.”
AfriForum’s American advocacy drew criticism in February 2025 from South African politicians who accused it of encouraging measures that could hurt ordinary South Africans. Separately, the agricultural organization AgriSA warned that misinformation about land reform was damaging the investment climate.
Speaking with New Lines, AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel welcomed the restrictions and rejected responsibility for wider harm. He said AfriForum’s position was to “punish those individuals that are responsible for irresponsible behavior,” rather than the country.
Kriel said AfriForum did not use the term “genocide,” advocating a specific policing response to farm murders. Asked whether Trump’s claim was wrong, he declined to say: “From our interpretation, it simply does not promote our cause to get involved in these kind of debates.”
Even Kriel, whose organization has spent years campaigning on farm murders and alleged discrimination against Afrikaners, stops short of calling it genocide.
On March 31, Roets, now of Lex Libertas, and the New York Young Republican Club took that case directly to the White House National Security Council and State Department, briefing officials on farm murders, alleged anti-white discrimination, race-based laws and threats to property rights, while advocating targeted sanctions against South African individuals, according to their joint statement.
The South African government developed Black economic empowerment, or BEE, to address the racial inequalities in ownership, skills and economic opportunity that were created by apartheid and persisted after its end. Preferential treatment in government contracting is one of its tools, giving businesses a commercial incentive to broaden Black participation in ownership, employment and supply chains.
Roets presents these measures to American audiences as a warning against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. He argues that BEE has enriched politically connected people rather than reducing inequality. “And so what’s happening in South Africa in terms of BEE should be a warning to America” about what he calls the “South Africanization of the Western world.” For Rasool, persistent racial inequality is an argument for deeper redress, not its abandonment, and speaks of “embarrassment at the slow pace of change.” He argues that ending apartheid’s laws did not itself redistribute land and wealth or erase the educational and economic advantages they created that excluded the black majority.
Defending the visa restriction policy, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told New Lines that “The United States will not stand by while individuals undermine U.S. foreign policy interests and fail their own people through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance.”
The formulation captures the inversion at the heart of the dispute: Washington describes South Africa’s redress policies as racial grievance while making the narrative of Afrikaner grievance a basis of its own policy toward the country.
Washington’s demands extend beyond farm violence. At a BizNews conference in March, U.S. Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III called for greater protection for rural farming communities, condemnation of rhetoric inciting violence, fair compensation standards for expropriation, and changes to ownership requirements affecting investors. He also challenged Pretoria’s claimed nonalignment, citing its relations with Iran.
Washington’s objections are not confined to South Africa’s domestic policies. The same February 2025 order that prioritized Afrikaner refugees cited Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice among its reasons for cutting aid. Rasool sees a “symmetry”: South Africa accuses Israel of genocide; “Donald Trump charges us with a genocide against whites.”
For Rasool, defending that case despite American pressure follows the lesson he took from Mandela: Values should guide interests, rather than yielding to them. He calls this “the diplomacy of Ubuntu, the diplomacy of human interdependence.”
“This visa restriction policy is only the first step in a series of escalatory measures,” Bozell wrote on X after Rubio announced the measures, warning of severe consequences if U.S. concerns were not addressed.
For the South African government, the demands are an infringement of the country’s sovereignty. International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola called the policy a “mischaracterization of South Africa’s domestic policies” aligned with the narratives of “fringe groups who wrongly portray themselves as representatives of ‘minorities’ and Afrikaners in general.”
Chrispin Phiri, spokesperson for the minister of international relations and cooperation, told New Lines that “It’s very difficult not to characterize this as a potential interference of our domestic laws.”
The dispute brings farm killings, political songs and land reform together in one allegation of persecution. Yet these involve different questions: how to prevent crime, what counts as hate speech and how to remedy historical dispossession.
The disagreement over political speech that the U.S. calls “incitement” centers on the liberation-era song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.” The ruling African National Congress Party says its members are no longer allowed to sing it. Opposition politician Julius Malema has repeatedly sung it at rallies of his Economic Freedom Fighters party. In AfriForum’s legal bid to have the song declared hate speech, the Equality Court found that an intention to incite harm and propagate hatred had not been established. It rejected a literal reading of the lyrics, finding that a reasonable listener would understand them in their political and cultural context as protected expression, not hate speech. With no further appeals possible following a 2025 rejection by the Constitutional Court, AfriForum has now enlisted the U.S. State Department to press the matter.
On economic redress, Phiri drew a comparison with Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling. He described the government’s policies as “race-conscious laws, not race-discriminatory laws,” adding that “these are historical injustices that our constitution obliges us to undo.”
He compared the Expropriation Act to eminent domain in the U.S., saying it allowed expropriation without compensation only in exceptional circumstances and subject to due process. The law, passed through Parliament and now being challenged in court, has not yet come into operation.
Apartheid did not merely separate people socially. Its laws privileged white access to property, education and skilled jobs while dispossessing Black South Africans and restricting where they could live and work. Rasool argues that repealing those laws did not, by itself, redistribute land and wealth or erase the educational and economic advantages whites had accumulated. In his account, redress is an attempt to change the material order inherited in 1994, not the introduction of race into an otherwise equal society.
For Rasool, the case for redress lies in the country’s persistent wealth disparities. A 2022 World Bank report placed South Africa among the world’s most unequal countries, with race a key factor, and found that the top 10% of the income distribution held 80.6% of financial assets in 2019. Rasool cites a 2017 Land Audit Report, based on 2015 ownership data, that found white individuals owned 72% of the total area of farms and agricultural holdings that were held by individual owners.
The same policies thus serve two political arguments. Pretoria invokes them as redress for apartheid, and Roets presents them to Americans as a warning about their own country’s future.
Roets’ organization and the New York Young Republican Club plan a Sept. 26 vigil with 3,000 white crosses on Washington’s National Mall for South African farm-murder victims. Their campaign petition asks the U.S. to support self-governance in South Africa. Roets wants Washington to “do more with regard to South Africa, not less.”
Joan van Zyl, a journalist who is also active with Afrikaners for South Africa, sees the cross project as a bid for American backing for self-determination rather than simply a memorial. In her view, “they’re using the farm violence as an excuse.” Roets describes his goal as autonomy for “all the peoples of South Africa,” including greater powers for provinces and municipalities, not only ethnic communities.
As an Afrikaner, du Preez objects to both the portrayal of his community as persecuted and the political purposes he believes it serves in the United States. “I feel offended. I feel used. They are using my ethnic identity to further their aims in the United States.”
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