The US has imposed targeted visa restrictions on South Africans accused of supporting race-based discrimination, land seizures and incitement of violence.
The United States has announced new visa restrictions targeting certain South African nationals it accuses of involvement in “race-based discrimination and incitement of imminent violence.”
In a statement issued Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was “gravely concerned about racially motivated crime and government-sponsored discrimination occurring against the Afrikaners and other minority populations in South Africa.” Rubio said the concerns included race-based discriminatory legislation, threats of land expropriation without compensation, and incitement of racial violence through “dehumanizing chants and slogans.”
The policy, announced under President Trump’s Executive Order 14204, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” targets individuals the US says 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.” According to some reporting, family members of those targeted may also be subject to the restrictions.
An Escalating Diplomatic Dispute
President Trump’s administration has repeatedly criticised South Africa over alleged racial inequality targeting Afrikaners, descendants mainly of Dutch and French settlers who make up roughly 7 percent of South Africa’s population.
“The United States will not allow such behavior to go unchecked,” Rubio said, adding that the actions “directly undermine peace, economic stability, and the rule of law, and they are incompatible with the pillars of America’s foreign policy.”
The secretary of state said the South African government had failed to adequately address the US’s previously stated concerns, prompting the new visa restriction policy. In a social media post, Rubio said South Africans have been “failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority.”
This is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration targeting South Africa over the issue. Rubio previously declared South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, no longer welcome in Washington, and the administration has separately cited South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, as well as its deepening ties with Iran, as further sources of tension between the two countries.
South Africa Rejects the Allegations
South Africa has denied the allegations underpinning the visa restrictions. Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, said he noted the announcement with “concern,” describing it as aligned with the “mischaracterisation of South Africa’s domestic policies by fringe groups who wrongly portray themselves as representatives of ‘minorities’ and Afrikaners in general.”
South African officials and analysts have pointed to land ownership data as evidence against the “persecution” framing: a 2017 government report found that white South Africans, despite making up a small share of the population, owned a disproportionately large amount of land, including 72 percent of individually owned farmland. South Africa’s Expropriation Act, cited in Trump’s original 2025 executive order, permits land expropriation without compensation only in limited, legally defined circumstances, and the South African government maintains it has not carried out the mass land seizures the US has alleged.
Refugee Admissions Context
The dispute has played out alongside a separate US policy prioritising the admission of white South Africans as refugees. Nearly all refugees settled in the US since last October were South African, with the total number of Afrikaners admitted reaching more than 7,700 by late June, even as the broader US refugee programme for the rest of the world was largely shuttered. Trump has said resettling Afrikaners in the US would help strengthen national security and public safety.
Some Afrikaner recipients of that resettlement offer have themselves publicly rejected the premise that they need asylum, describing their circumstances in South Africa as privileged rather than persecuted.
South Africa’s history includes the apartheid system, under which land and resources were seized from the country’s Black majority and confined largely to designated areas known as “Bantustans,” a system that persisted until the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.
