Former South African Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, has urged people of colour to be more cautious when travelling to the US.
This after health and political activist Zackie Achmat was detained by the US Customs and Border Protection for several hours while returning from Canada.
Achmat, 63, was detained by US customs and border agents at Pearson Airport.
He was travelling to Cape Town with a connecting flight through Newark.
Achmat had received the inaugural Paul Farmer award for Global Health Equity, which was established in honour of the late Dr Paul Farmer, a physician, advocate, and global health icon.
While initially receiving the award last year, Achmat only arrived last week to accept it in person.
Speaking on his ordeal, Achmat said: “A very dumpy MAGA member, who will not be referred to by their gender, because they were really horrible, asked me whether I was carrying anything biological. I asked what they meant? (They said) ‘Biological, you know’.
“I’m like, ‘no, I don’t know’. Is it my underpants, my dirty underpants?”
Achmat said that he was asked a series of successive questions about who he spoke to and where he stayed.
Despite his internal reservations about not sharing the information, he did inform them that he was in Montreal after being invited to give a talk.
“(They questioned) Who did you meet there?”
Achmat answered that he wanted to say “terror suspects” and listed a few, using Shireen Hassim as an example, whose sister (Adila) did the ICJ case for South Africa, but he didn’t say that.
“I actually just said I was with friends, and I stayed at a hotel. (They questioned) What are you going to do in the United States? I said, ‘No, I’m not going to the United States’. I’m going to Cape Town.
“‘What are you going to do in the United States?’ I said nothing. I don’t want to go into your country. That is why I’m going to Cape Town. My patience ran out, and I said, ‘I don’t have anything more to tell you’. So they said, ‘Come with me’.”
Achmat explained that he was taken to an area where there were two other people sitting.
“I chatted to both of them, trying to calm them down as I was like, ‘What is this?’ But clearly, the most stressful thing for any human being is to go through immigration, and that’s a known thing, especially for people who are refugees, asylum seekers, or immigrants.
“They face terror. I’m a lucky person,” Achmat said.
He added that he sat down, read his book after “a really nice man” re-questioned him.
“He said, I have to wait to get your luggage. The luggage took 2.5 hours to get there, by which time I’d missed my flight from here to Newark, and I missed my connecting flight from Newark to Cape Town.”
“I’m going to write to the US ambassador to South Africa… to say, I have a 10-year visa. I don’t want it. It’s now nine years left on the visa. I don’t want it. I don’t want to set foot in your country ever again.”
Rasool said that people of colour from SA and even elsewhere are special targets for such treatment, whereas a white South African will enjoy special privileges and a great welcome.
“This is the reality of my March 2025 assessment of a supremacist instinct at work in the USA, especially when related to ICE deportations of Hispanics and FBI targeting of Muslims, like Sami Hamdi. So such targeted communities are indeed taking special precautions, like keeping lawyers on standby and allowing families to track every step of their journey.
“Someone like Zackie Achmat would, like Sami Hamdi, have an additional target on him given his history of anti-racist and social justice activism, which would have been surveilled through his social media,” Rasool said.
“In this time of hostility by Trump towards SA, people of colour must indeed be more cautious and take the special precautions required.”
Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, Isaac Khambule said: “In terms of trying to be cautious, I think if you look at what ICE is currently doing in the US, then it shows you that those South Africans travelling to the US should definitely ensure that they have all their documents with them all the time, so that they can be able to prove as to why they’re in the US.
“As things stand, no one really knows how far the tension is going to be, because we know the US is hosting the soccer World Cup next year, and as to how it is going to receive South Africans, who will be embarking to the US to watch the World Cup. I think there are those factors that are currently at play.”
Khambule added that he thinks Achmat’s situation is an isolated incident, but that it is important to consider certain facts, such as the admission of the ambassador-elect, “knowing the remarks he has made about South Africa and how anti-transformation we are”.
