The US decision to expel South Africa’s ambassador was “regrettable,” the office of the South African president said Saturday, March 15, after Washington’s top diplomat accused the envoy of hating America and President Donald Trump.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, was “no longer welcome” in the United States. Rasool is “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS,” Rubio posted on X, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”

South Africa’s presidency said in a statement it had “noted the regrettable expulsion” and urged “all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter.”

“South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America,” the presidency said.

Rasool “was informed by the State Department yesterday that he had 72 hours to leave,” the South African foreign ministry told Agence France-Presse on Saturday.

The expulsion of the ambassador – a very rare move by the US – is the latest development in rising tensions between Washington and Pretoria. Trump in February froze US aid to South Africa, citing a law in the country that he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers.

Rising tensions

Last week, Trump further fueled tensions, saying South Africa’s farmers were welcome to settle in the United States after repeating his accusations that the government was “confiscating” land from white people. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.”

One of Trump’s closest allies is South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who has accused South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of having “openly racist ownership laws.”

Land ownership is a contentious issue in South Africa, with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid and the government under pressure to implement reforms.

During a G20 event in South Africa last month, Ramaphosa said he had a “wonderful” call with Trump soon after the US leader took office in January. But relations later “seemed to go a little bit off the rails,” he said.

In his X post, Rubio linked to an article from the conservative news outlet Breitbart, which addressed Rasool’s remarks via livestream to a foreign policy seminar on Friday. “He said that white supremacism was motivating Trump’s ‘disrespect’ for the ‘current hegemonic order’ of the world,” Breitbart reported, adding that Rasool noted that Trump’s Make America Great Again movement “was a white supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the United States.”

Rasool, an anti-apartheid campaigner in his youth, has expressed anger toward the Israeli government for its war in Gaza. In February in an interview with news site Zeteo, he said what South Africans experienced during apartheid rule “is on steroids in Palestine.”