The United States has a State Department bureau whose job is to promote democracy and human rights around the world. Until last year, its money mostly went to poor countries and dictatorships. It paid to fight corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It paid to fight the sexual abuse of children in Afghanistan.
Then Trump's appointees took it over. They gutted the staff, canceled programs and pointed some of the money at conservative causes in Europe.
ProPublica reports that one of the bureau's first new human rights awards is expected to go to AfriForum, a South African group that speaks for Afrikaners, a part of that country's white population. The award is nearly $1 million. It would pay to "document hateful rhetoric and violent acts" against Afrikaners and other minorities.
AfriForum told ProPublica its understanding is that the award has not been finalized. The State Department said it doesn't comment on funding talks.
The claim doesn't match the numbers
AfriForum has spent years pushing the story that white farmers are under attack. It has said it disagrees with Trump's claim of a "white genocide." Still, ProPublica describes it as a group that promotes the disputed idea that white farmers are a violently targeted, persecuted group.
South Africa does have a terrible violence problem, and some Afrikaners have been tortured and murdered. But independent researchers have found those killings are a tiny share of the country's murders. The country's murder victims are disproportionately people in poor urban areas, where residents are mostly Black. Official statistics and two formal inquiries do not show a pattern of targeted violence against Afrikaners.
White South Africans also remain one of the wealthiest parts of the population, ProPublica notes. Afrikaners ran the country for decades under apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation that ended in 1994.
AfriForum's leader, Kallie Kriel, has said apartheid "was wrong." He has also said it wasn't a crime against humanity, on the grounds that not enough people were killed.
And the research may not even be needed. Carolyn Holmes, a University of Tennessee professor, noted that AfriForum already puts out yearly reports on crimes against farming communities.
"These data already exist," she told ProPublica. "You don't need a new study."
Where the money stopped going
The money didn't just appear. It comes after Trump's team shut down programs working to end violence in African countries like Sudan, where the Biden administration determined in 2025 that there was a genocide.
"It's offensive to provide funding solely to this one group after we've cut off funding in countries undergoing real documented crises," said David Jandura, who managed the Africa portfolio at the bureau and lost his job in the 2025 layoffs.
Two former senior U.S. officials who handled Africa policy told ProPublica they would never have funded the group. "We would certainly not have funded what we would see as a racially incendiary initiative," one said.
It was first aimed at a handpicked winner
ProPublica revealed in July that the State Department first planned to give this same award to Lex Libertas, a small new group founded by a former AfriForum executive. The plan to skip the usual competition drew outrage from Congress. Only after that reporting did the department open the money up to applicants, offering $986,500.
One official who has defended the support is Samuel Samson, a Trump-appointed deputy assistant secretary. He has described what America shares with Afrikaners as "a common heritage, a common culture, a common way of life, shared history and ultimately a common anthropology."
Audie Klotz, a Syracuse University professor who has studied ties between Afrikaner groups and white nationalists in the U.S., rejected that. "There's no heritage connection here," she told ProPublica. "It's pure scientific racism."
A Senate aide to Democrats told ProPublica they had not received a briefing on who gets this money, despite repeated requests, and called that "highly unusual." A senior State Department official said the department routinely keeps Congress informed.
One group gets special treatment again
This fits a pattern we've been tracking. Trump shut the refugee program to almost everyone else. Of the 12,904 refugees let in by September of the last budget year, all but three came from South Africa, and officials plan to bring in up to 17,500 more this budget year, primarily Afrikaners.
Now the same government is expected to use human rights money to back their cause, after cutting programs that documented atrocities elsewhere.
What we know
After slashing programs that documented atrocities abroad, Trump's State Department is expected to give nearly $1 million in human rights money to AfriForum, a group promoting the disputed claim that white South African farmers are being targeted. Official statistics and two inquiries show no pattern of targeted violence against Afrikaners. The award was first aimed at a small group founded by a former AfriForum executive, and it has not been finalized.
