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As Donald Trump's influence wanes and his behavior grows increasingly volatile, he has intensified vitriolic attacks aimed at female journalists and ethnic communities, including Somali immigrants as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from the animosity behind them and his position, not any basis in truth. In a parallel manner, his administration's offensive against immigrants are poorly executed and driven by misinformation. It is abundantly clear that the objective is not targeting those who have committed crimes. The true target is people of color.

This includes Indigenous peoples carrying tribal IDs to naturalized US citizens, from essential workers in building sites and hospitals to those who served, 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 brutal, inhumane and achieve nothing for public safety," asserts a leading political figure from New York. The spectacle of masked agents breaking car glass and separating parents from children, terrorizing entire communities and hindering the function of institutions, undermines safety entirely.

These waves of calculated hatred—directed at 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 communities do not justify the animosity.

The Imaginary White Nation and Historical Reality

This campaign of terror and demonization claims to seek at recreating a homogeneously white America that is a fantasy. While the US was demographically whiter in the youth of today's white supremacists, it was never exclusively a "white country". In 1776, the thirteen founding colonies contained a substantial percentage of African and Native American individuals—some southern states had Black populations exceeding a third.

Following American expansion, taking Texas in the 1840s and seizing Mexico's northern territories in 1848, it absorbed a vast Spanish-speaking population long established in what is now the Southwestern U.S. and California. It is documented that the initial Muslim of African descent in this land came as part of a Spanish exploration party almost one hundred years prior to the Mayflower's Puritan passengers landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Population Truths Versus Forced Dreams

The systematic targeting of vast numbers of brown-skinned individuals and even mass deportations will not manufacture the all-white nation of extremist imagination. A city like Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and despite enforcement outrages, arrests, and deportations, its character persists. Its name itself is Spanish, an ongoing testament of its original inhabitants.

The entirety of this animus and oppression resembles the panic of bigots attempting to believe they can halt the demographic future of a country no longer majority-white by using pure cruelty.

It is coupled with an attack on abortion access that is, at times, openly intended to encourage white women to have more children. The argument points to a fertility rate below replacement level in the US, a trend less impactful than in other countries because of a young, industrious immigrant workforce which keeps the economy functioning. However, instead of offering the societal assistance that might make raising children easier, the approach is punitive and coercive.

A prominent journalist notes that the policies on childbirth of certain political figures—along with insults aimed at women without children—amount to pronatalism. This ideology "typically merges worries about declining birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-women's rights ideas."

In a similar vein, analyses show that "efforts to bolster the birth rate cannot make up for broader policies designed to cut federal support programs like Medicaid and insurance for kids. This focus on families is not just for encouraging procreation. Instead, it is being weaponized to advance a conservative agenda that endangers the health of women, bodily autonomy, and economic participation."

Incoherent Policies and Widespread Resistance

Together, the anti-immigration and pronatalist policies constitute an effort to artificially redirect the country's population future. In the end, they represent senseless intimidation by proponents of hate who unintentionally demonstrate that their assertions of being better must be rooted in race and gender; absent these categories, their positions devolve into incoherent nonsense.

A lot of the reasoning offered by the Trump team fails to align with observable realities and actual outcomes. For example, naval operations in the southern Caribbean frequently focus on small vessels which are not proven to be transporting drugs and not able of making it to the United States. Similarly, Venezuela's role in the fentanyl trade is minimal, and its role in cocaine trafficking is far less than that of other South American nations.

The government's position extends to climate issues, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "Net Zero goals." An emotional commitment to fossil fuels, particularly coal, resulting in measures that compel localities to spend money on obsolete and toxic energy sources while sabotaging affordable, clean alternatives. At the same time, health officials have promoted anti-scientific dietary schemes while weakening broader health protections.

The foundational assumption of the attacks on immigrants is that people of color born abroad are threatening outsiders. Yet, from coast to coast—from Los Angeles to Charlotte, Chicago to Portland—it is the administration's own agents, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom many residents perceive as the dangerous and hostile interlopers.

No symbol is more powerful of the broad repudiation of this approach than the thousands of people mobilizing, demonstrating, facing danger and detention to defend their neighbors. City after city has stood up in defense of its residents. All the insults and threats can alter this fundamental truth.