Dozens of White Afrikaners are scheduled to arrive in the US on Monday, the first beneficiaries of a controversial resettlement programme instigated by President Donald Trump that his South African counterpart says is misguided.

Tensions between Washington and Pretoria have been running high since Trump began his second term in January, accused the South African authorities of seizing land from White Afrikaners and offered to resettle them as refugees in the US. Elon Musk, the president’s Pretoria-born billionaire backer, has meanwhile spread a conspiracy theory that there is a “genocide” of White people in the country.

There have been no official land seizures in South Africa since apartheid ended in 1994, while police statistics show young Black men bear the brunt of violent crime. About 7% of South Africa’s 63-million people are White, and 11% of the population speak Afrikaans as their home language.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, who’s been trying to mend relations with South Africa’s second-biggest trading partner, said he told Trump in a recent conversation that the US had been misinformed about a “fringe group” of Afrikaners who wanted to leave — and that they didn’t fit the description of refugees.

“Those people who have fled are not being persecuted. They are not being hounded, they are not being treated badly and they are leaving ostensibly because they don’t want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country in accordance with our constitution,” Ramaphosa told a panel discussion in Ivory Coast on Monday. “We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them.”

Other points of contention between the US and South Africa include Pretoria’s decision to file a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel, a top American ally, of committing a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and Pretoria’s close ties with Iran.

Ramaphosa is planning a working visit to the US, and the Presidency will communicate the details soon, International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola told reporters on Monday.

AfriForum, a conservative White Afrikaans rights group, described the departure of the first “refugees” to the US as a serious indictment against South Africa’s government, which it said has refused to condemn calls for violence against Afrikaners, adopted racially discriminatory legislation and condoned land seizures.

“AfriForum and our allies will also intensify our efforts to use every possible mechanism at our disposal, including international pressure, to bring about a change of direction in the country for the benefit of all, including Afrikaners,” Kallie Kriel, the group’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.