State Department eyes $335,000 campaign as Afrikaner refugee applications lag

Three-phase plan pairs focus groups with a 1,000-person survey and Afrikaans ads

The State Department is weighing a roughly $335,000 research and advertising campaign in South Africa aimed at understanding why Afrikaner applications to a US refugee program have fallen short of expectations, according to an August 2026 proposal seen by the Guardian.

The proposal, written by the US mission in South Africa with a State Department research unit for the embassy in Pretoria, acknowledges that officials know little about the gap between the administration’s refugee goals and Afrikaner interest. “There’s currently little research about why Afrikaners are not applying to request referral into the US Refugee Admissions Program,” the proposal reads. Applications have “trended lower than expected” since Afrikaners were allowed to apply directly online in November 2025.

The focus on Afrikaners flows from a February 2025 executive order directing officials to prioritize Afrikaner resettlement while the broader refugee program remained largely suspended. Administration officials have said Afrikaners face racial discrimination and “white genocide.” The South African government has rejected those claims, and outside experts have widely dismissed the idea that Afrikaners face targeted violence or genocide. Trump’s 2025 order also alleged that South Africa had “taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”

The proposal lays out a three-phase plan. The first phase would hold focus groups in eight South African communities — Pretoria and Krugersdorp in Gauteng, Bloemfontein and Kroonstad in Free State, Stellenbosch and Worcester in Western Cape, and Kimberley and Orania in the Northern Cape. Orania is an Afrikaner-only separatist community. Each location would host two age groups, 20 to 35 and 40 to 55, with participants sorted by urban or rural setting and household income.

In the second phase, a survey of 1,000 Afrikaners, conducted online and offline, would test which messages work in which communities. The third phase would be a six-month digital campaign, mostly in Afrikaans with possibly some English, aimed at Afrikaners “interested in migrating.” Because the community is hard to reach through conventional social and press channels, the proposal says, the department would hire an agency with local knowledge and use “trusted messengers.”

A State Department spokesperson defended the program in response to questions from the Guardian. “We continue to process and admit as refugees Afrikaners in South Africa who are escaping the threat of government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” the spokesperson said. “President Trump has been very clear that we are prioritizing the resettlement of Afrikaners in South Africa who are escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination,” the spokesperson added, citing the February 2025 executive order.

The application shortfall is stark against the program’s overall scale. The US admitted 16,292 refugees in the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2026, according to the State Department’s most recent data reporting. The remaining five admissions were Afghans — three from November 2025 and two from September 2026. A year earlier, South Africans made up 342 of 38,102 refugee admissions.

Trump last year restricted refugee admissions to 7,500, the lowest in US history, then raised the cap to 17,500 in May, with the added slots again going primarily to Afrikaners. The overall cap had been 125,000 under President Joe Biden.

The refugee program is one piece of a broader rupture between Washington and Pretoria. Trump announced last November that South Africa would not be invited to the 2026 G20 summit, which the US is hosting in Miami in mid-December, citing alleged abuses against white farmers. Washington has also cut aid and restricted visas over South Africa’s race and land policies.

This year’s Nobel peace prize went to Navi Pillay, the South African judge who chaired the UN commission that concluded Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza. Trump wrote on Truth Social: “I know nothing about this woman, and neither does anyone else!” and said the prize should have gone to “the Great United States of America, whose Representative, ME, settled eight Wars, and many other things.”

Last month, US Ambassador to Pretoria Leo Brent Bozell III wrote in an op-ed that his government was “shocked” by what it characterized as Pretoria’s silence on a set of US requests. He cited concern over South Africa’s 2024 Expropriation Act and a push to make rural crime a priority.

South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, speaking in New York last month, said “there is no evidence” for the genocide claim. Pretoria has also argued that the low application rate shows the claims are false.

The administration is also directing funds behind the cause. Just before funds expired, the Trump administration moved to direct more than $175 million from the State Department’s Human Rights and Democracy Fund to 43 grants worth $176.9 million, the Guardian previously reported. That is most of the $205 million Congress appropriated for the fund, which the Guardian has described as bolstering rightwing causes abroad.

One grant worth $1 million is meant for “advancing white Afrikaner rights” in South Africa and for collecting data on abuses against minorities. No recipient has been named. Sources with knowledge of the awards process told the Guardian that administration figures lobbied personally for the awards, reflecting the priorities of JD Vance on European cultural identity and Stephen Miller on immigration and support for white minorities.

The bureau that runs refugee admissions has new leadership. Adam Zerbinopoulos, a career diplomat, became its senior official on August 31.