The U.S. will boycott this month’s G20 summit in South Africa, Donald Trump announced on Friday, repeating his unfounded claims of an ongoing genocide against white people in the country.
“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” Trump wrote on Truth Social of the upcoming summit, which begins on November 22. “Afrikaners (People who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated. No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue.”
The Independent has contacted the South African embassy in Washington for comment.
Throughout this year, the president has echoed viral misinformation and claimed that white people, in particular farmers, are being killed in a genocide in South Africa. South African officials, outside observers, and a prominent group representing Afrikaner farmers have all denied such a campaign is taking place.
The president has pointed to inflammatory comments from a fringe politician in South Africa and a newly passed land seizure law as evidence of his unfounded remarks, including during a tense Oval Office in May meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
At the meeting, Ramaphosa vigorously denied any genocide is taking place and said the official has no genuine power in the country, while comparing the land seizure law to the U.S. use of eminent domain.
In May, South Africa’s Police Minister Senzo Mchunu said there were six farm killings between January and March, five of whose victims were Black. During the previous quarter, 12 people were murdered on farms, only one of whom was white.
In February, a South African court dismissed claims of a white genocide as “clearly imagined.”
Despite the dearth of evidence, the U.S. has used claims of a white genocide to reshape major parts of its immigration policy.
The Trump administration has largely frozen refugee admissions, though in May a small group of Afrikaners were let into the country, even as their home country denied they were refugees at all.
Since then, the White House has shrunken the overall refugee cap from 125,000 people per year to 7,500, with most slots reserved for white South Africans.
Refugee groups have criticized the move, arguing it shifts U.S. policy away from need-based consideration, instead returning the country to the prior century’s history of explicitly racial immigration policies.
“At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the program’s purpose as well as its credibility,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, said last month.
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