President Trump has ordered a freeze on all foreign aid to South Africa in an executive order he signed Friday, claiming that a new land reform law amounts to “government-sponsored race-based discrimination.” The country’s white minority still owns the vast majority of farmland decades after the end of apartheid rule. Trump also criticized South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ and said the United States would accept white South Africans as refugees facing what he characterized as persecution. The cuts to aid are already causing widespread suffering in South Africa, where “after 30 years of democracy, not much has changed in terms of wealth ownership” and a white population with colonial roots is “using politics, ideology, misinformation and propaganda … to maintain the status quo,” says South African activist Trevor Ngwane.