67,000 South African refugee requests handed to US embassy
The South African Chamber of Commerce in the USA has handed over the details of more than 67,000 South Africans to the US embassy in Pretoria.
This follows President Donald Trump’s executive order to offer refugee status to Afrikaners.
Tuesday’s handover is part of their support for resettlement in the US.
The chamber’s president, Neil Diamond, said the chamber will now focus on promoting US-South Africa business relations and urged registrants to contact the embassy directly for updates.
The handover came a day after President Cyril Ramaphosa said that South Africa considers improving its relationship with the United States a "priority”.
Tensions between the two countries boiled over on Friday when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool was "persona non grata".
Rubio linked his post to an article from conservative news outlet Breitbart, which wrote that, in an online seminar Friday, Rasool had described Trump's Make America Great Again movement as "a white supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the United States".
Rubio called him "a race-baiting politician" who hates President Donald Trump.
Rasool's expulsion is the latest development in tensions between Washington and Pretoria over several policy disagreements, including South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice over the war on Gaza.
Rubio refused to travel to South Africa in February for talks among top diplomats from the Group of 20, the world's largest economies, claiming the meeting had an "anti-American" agenda.
Asked about the row, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said that the Trump administration's issue with South Africa "isn't one just of demeanour or decorum".
South Africa is taking actions that are "not in the interest -- the best interest -- of providing a safe, secure, more prosperous America, let alone world", she told reporters in Washington.
But she said that the point was "not to punish or to target people or countries" and that the United States was interested in "changing policy" in South Africa.
Ramaphosa said South Africa would seek to engage with the United States by dispatching envoys from the business community and government.
"This is our responsibility as a government to advance the interests of our country as well as the interests of the people of South Africa," he said.
*Additional reporting by AFP
