The US government could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a media campaign in South Africa to figure out why more white Afrikaners are not applying to become refugees to the US, as Donald Trump had hoped.

State department officials, according to an August proposal seen by the Guardian, outlined a roughly $335,000 research and advertising effort after applications to the refugee program “trended lower than expected” since Afrikaners were allowed to apply directly online in November 2025. The document, written by the US mission in South Africa with a department research unit for the embassy in Pretoria, admits officials know little about why.

“There’s currently little research about why Afrikaners are not applying to request referral into the US Refugee Admissions Program,” the proposal reads.

The focus on Afrikaners flows from a February 2025 executive order directing officials to put Afrikaner resettlement first while the broader refugee program stayed suspended. Administration officials had said Afrikaners face racial discrimination and “white genocide”. The South African government has rejected the genocide claims, and experts have widely dismissed the idea that Afrikaners face targeted violence or genocide.

Last year, the president restricted refugee admissions to 7,500, the lowest in US history, then raised it to 17,500 in May, with the added slots again going primarily to Afrikaners. The overall cap was 125,000 under Joe Biden.

The US admitted 16,292 refugees in the fiscal year that ended 30 September, according to its most recent data reporting. The remaining five were Afghans: three from last November and two from September. A year earlier, South Africans made up 342 of 38,102 refugee admissions.

The state department plan would proceed in three phases. The pitch suggests focus groups would be held in 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, with the latter being an Afrikaner-only separatist community. Every location would host two age groups, 20 to 35 and 40 to 55, with participants grouped by urban or rural setting and household income. A survey of 1,000 Afrikaners, online and offline, would then test which messages work in which communities.

The final phase is 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”.

In response, a spokesperson with the state department said “we continue to process and admit as refugees Afrikaners in South Africa who are escaping the threat of government-sponsored race-based discrimination”.

“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,” as part of US policy from the executive order, the spokesperson added.

Trump’s 2025 order alleged “South Africa has 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.”

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, causing Trump to rave on Truth Social: “I know nothing about this woman, and neither does anyone else!” and that the prize should have gone to “the Great United States of America, whose Representative, ME, settled eight Wars, and many other things”.

The South African government, for its part, has rejected the claim of genocide as unfounded and politically motivated. In New York last month, foreign minister Ronald Lamola said “there is no evidence” for the genocide claim. Pretoria has also argued that few South Africans have taken up the offer, which it says shows the claims are false.

The refugee program is one piece in a broader rupture. 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.

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

The administration is also putting money behind the cause. Just before funds expired, it moved to direct more than $175m from the state department’s Human Rights and Democracy Fund to 43 grants worth $176.9m, as the Guardian has reported. That is most of the $205m Congress appropriated for the fund, which bolsters rightwing causes abroad.

One is a $1m grant 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 31 August.