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As the political power of Donald Trump diminishes and his behavior grows increasingly volatile, he has intensified hostile rhetoric aimed at female journalists and racial minorities, including Somali immigrants as a recent focal point. These disparaging remarks gain traction stems from the animosity behind them and his position, not their factual accuracy. In a parallel manner, the government's actions against immigrants are poorly executed and driven by misinformation. The evidence makes it obvious that the objective is not targeting individuals with criminal histories. The true target is people of color.

This includes Indigenous peoples carrying tribal IDs to naturalized US citizens, from essential workers in construction and healthcare to military veterans, university attendees, people in their own homes, and very young children: a broad cross-section of the country's population is under siege.

"ICE operations are cruel, unjust and do nothing for public safety," states a prominent New York City official. The spectacle of officers concealing their faces shattering windows and separating parents from children, instilling fear and disrupting schools and businesses, achieves the opposite effect.

These waves of calculated hatred—focusing on people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelan migrants this spring, and now Somalis—lean heavily on defamatory falsehoods and slurs. The reason is simple: the actual facts about these groups of people cannot support the animosity.

The Imaginary White Nation Versus Actual History

This campaign of terror and demonization purports to aim at rebuilding a uniformly white United States which is a fiction. Although America had a larger white population in the youth of today's white supremacists, it was never exclusively a "white country". At the nation's founding, the original thirteen colonies included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—certain states in the South had Black populations exceeding a third.

Following American expansion, annexing Texas in 1844 and acquiring northern Mexico in 1848, it absorbed a vast Spanish-speaking population already living across the modern Southwest and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in this land came as part of a Spanish expedition nearly a century before the Mayflower Puritan passengers landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Population Truths Versus Forced Dreams

The persecution of huge populations of people of color and attempts at large-scale expulsion will not manufacture the ethnically pure country of extremist imagination. A city like Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and despite enforcement outrages, detentions and removals, it remains so. The city's very name is Spanish, an enduring reminder of its original inhabitants.

All this hatred and oppression resembles the panic of racists attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country no longer predominantly white through sheer brutality.

This is paired with an assault on reproductive rights that is, at times, openly intended to prompt Caucasian women to bear more babies. The rationale cites a fertility rate below replacement level in the US, a phenomenon less severe than in other countries due to a young, industrious immigrant workforce which keeps the economy functioning. Yet, instead of offering the social support that might make raising children easier, the strategy has been based on punishment and force.

A prominent journalist observes that the reproductive politics of certain political figures—coupled with derogatory comments aimed at women without children—amount to pronatalism. This philosophy "typically merges concerns over falling fertility with opposition to immigration and anti-feminist viewpoints."

In a similar vein, analyses show that "efforts to bolster the birth rate cannot make up for broader policies aimed at slashing government assistance initiatives like healthcare for the poor and children's health insurance. The so-called 'pro-family' focus is not just for encouraging procreation. Rather, it is being weaponized to push a right-wing political program that threatens women's health, reproductive rights, and economic participation."

Incoherent Policies and Public Rejection

Together, the anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies represent an attempt to forcibly alter the country's population future. Ultimately, both amount to senseless intimidation by individuals filled with hatred who inadvertently reveal that their assertions of being better must be rooted in race and gender; absent these categories, their positions devolve into incoherent nonsense.

Much of the justification offered by the Trump team does not match up with tangible facts and actual outcomes. As an instance, maritime attacks in the Caribbean Sea often target tiny boats which are not proven to be transporting drugs and incapable of reaching US shores. Similarly, Venezuela's involvement in the fentanyl trade is negligible, and its role in cocaine trafficking is far less than that of other South American nations.

The administration's stance extends to environmental policy, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "Net Zero goals." An emotional attachment to fossil fuels, especially coal mining, resulting in measures that force communities to spend money on obsolete and toxic power sources while sabotaging affordable, clean alternatives. Concurrently, health officials have advanced anti-scientific dietary schemes while eroding general public health safeguards.

The core premise of the anti-immigrant offensive is that non-white individuals not born in the US are dangerous intruders. Yet, from coast to coast—from Los Angeles to Charlotte, Chicago to Portland—the government's own forces, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom local communities perceive as the unwelcome, violent invaders.

No symbol is more powerful of the widespread rejection of this approach than the countless individuals organizing, protesting, risking safety and arrest to protect their communities. Municipality after municipality has stood up in protection of its people. No amount of derogatory language or intimidation can change that reality.