🔗 Share this article

As the political power of Donald Trump diminishes and his public demeanor becomes more erratic, there has been an escalation in vitriolic attacks aimed at female journalists and ethnic communities, with Somali Americans as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from their malice and his platform, not any basis in truth. Similarly, the government's actions against immigrants are haphazard and founded on falsehoods. It is abundantly clear that the goal extends beyond targeting individuals with criminal histories. The assault is directed at anyone with brown skin.

This includes Indigenous peoples with official tribal documentation to naturalized US citizens, individuals performing critical jobs in building sites and hospitals to military veterans, college students, residents asleep in their beds, and toddlers: a wide array of the country's population is under siege.

"ICE operations are brutal, inhumane and do nothing for public safety," states a leading political figure from New York. The spectacle of officers concealing their faces shattering windows and separating parents from children, instilling fear and hindering the function of institutions, undermines safety entirely.

The cycles of orchestrated bigotry—focusing on people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelan migrants this spring, and most recently Somali Americans—lean heavily on libelous lies and insults. This is because: the actual facts about these groups of people do not justify the animosity.

The Mythical White Nation and Historical Reality

This campaign of terror and demonization purports to aim at recreating a homogeneously white America that is a fantasy. Although America had a larger white population in the mid-20th century, it was never exclusively a "white country". In 1776, the thirteen founding colonies contained a substantial percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—certain states in the South were over one-third Black.

When the United States expanded, annexing Texas in 1844 and acquiring northern Mexico in 1848, it absorbed a vast community of Hispanic settlers already living across what is now the Southwestern U.S. and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in territory that became the U.S. arrived with a Spanish exploration party nearly a century prior to the Mayflower's English Puritans reached the shores of New England in 1620.

Population Truths Against Coercive Fantasies

The persecution of vast numbers of people of color and even mass deportations cannot fabricate the all-white nation of extremist imagination. A city like Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and regardless of aggressive enforcement, arrests, and deportations, its character persists. The city's very name is Spanish, an ongoing testament of who was there first.

All this hatred and persecution resembles the panic of bigots attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country that is ceasing to be majority-white by using pure cruelty.

This is paired with an attack on abortion access that is, at times, explicitly designed to encourage white women to have more children. The argument points to a fertility rate below replacement level in the US, a phenomenon less impactful than in some other nations due to a hard-working population of immigrant laborers which keeps the economy functioning. However, rather than providing the societal assistance that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the strategy has been punitive and coercive.

A prominent journalist notes that the reproductive politics espoused by figures like JD Vance—coupled with derogatory comments aimed at women without children—constitute a form of pronatalism. This ideology "typically merges concerns over falling fertility with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas."

Similarly, reporting indicates that "attempts to raise the birth rate do not compensate for broader policies aimed at slashing government assistance initiatives like healthcare for the poor and children's health insurance. This focus on families isn't merely about encouraging procreation. Rather, it is being weaponized to advance a conservative agenda that endangers the health of women, bodily autonomy, and economic participation."

Contradictory Strategies and Widespread Resistance

Together, the anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies constitute an effort to artificially redirect the nation's demographic trajectory. Ultimately, both amount to senseless intimidation by proponents of hate who inadvertently reveal that their assertions of being better must be based on skin color and sex; without these constructs, their positions devolve into incoherent nonsense.

Much of the justification offered by the Trump team fails to align with tangible facts and real-world results. For example, naval operations in the Caribbean Sea often target tiny boats not confirmed to be carrying narcotics and incapable of making it to the United States. Similarly, Venezuela's role in the fentanyl trade is minimal, and its role in cocaine trafficking is much smaller than that of other South American nations.

The government's position extends to climate issues, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "carbon neutrality targets." An emotional commitment to fossil fuels, particularly coal, resulting in measures that compel localities to invest in outdated and polluting power sources while undermining cheaper, cleaner renewables. Concurrently, health officials have promoted anti-scientific dietary schemes while weakening general public health safeguards.

The core premise of the anti-immigrant offensive is that non-white individuals not born in the US are threatening outsiders. Yet, from coast to coast—in cities like L.A. and Charlotte, Chicago to Portland—it is the administration's own agents, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom many residents perceive as the unwelcome, violent invaders.

No symbol is more powerful of the broad repudiation of this approach than the countless individuals mobilizing, demonstrating, risking safety and arrest to defend their neighbors. Municipality after municipality has stood up in defense of its residents. No amount of derogatory language and threats can alter this fundamental truth.