WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that South Africa’s ambassador to the United States “is no longer welcome” in the country, in the latest Trump administration move targeting the African nation.

Rubio, in a post on X, accused Ebrahim Rasool of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates President Donald Trump. Rubio declared the South African diplomat “persona non grata.”

Neither Rubio, who posted as he was flying back to Washington from a Group of 7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, nor the State Department gave any immediate explanation for the decision.

But Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier Friday as part of a South African think tank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a United States where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.

Both Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticized the country’s Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people.

It is highly unusual for the U.S. to expel a foreign ambassador, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.

At the height of U.S.-Russia diplomatic expulsions during the Cold War and then again over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, allegations of interference in the 2016 U.S. election and the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain, neither Washington nor Moscow saw fit to expel the respective ambassadors.

Phone calls to the South African Embassy seeking comment, made at the end of the work day, were not answered.

Rasool previously served as his country’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2010 to 2015 before returning to the post in January.

As a child, he and his family were evicted from a Cape Town neighborhood designated for white people. Rasool became an anti-apartheid campaigner, serving time in prison for his activism and identifying as a comrade of the country’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela. He later became a politician in Mandela’s African National Congress political party