The US has announced visa restrictions on some South Africans as Donald Trump’s administration continues to claim that South Africa’s government racially discriminates against white minority Afrikaners.
The announcement did not specify individuals who were barred from the US. Trump has spent his second term falsely claiming there is a “white genocide” in South Africa and railing against its affirmative action policies.
Since the start of last year, the US has cut aid to South Africa, barred it from this year’s G20 summit in Miami and set up a refugee programme for Afrikaners and other South African racial minorities. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been dismantling refugee and asylum programmes for people fleeing war and persecution.
“The South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in a post on X.
“The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanising rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations.”
The US visa restrictions would target “foreign nationals who enact or enable policies that promote race-based discrimination, incite violence, or enable land confiscation without compensation in South Africa”, Rubio added.
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