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As Donald Trump's influence wanes and his public demeanor becomes more erratic, there has been an escalation in vitriolic attacks aimed at female journalists and racial minorities, with Somali Americans being the latest target. The impact of these insults stems from their malice and his platform, not their factual accuracy. 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.

From Native Americans carrying tribal IDs to American citizens by choice, individuals performing critical jobs in construction and healthcare to those who served, university attendees, residents asleep in their beds, and toddlers: a wide array of the country's population is under siege.

"Immigration enforcement raids are brutal, inhumane and do nothing for community security," states a prominent New York City official. The spectacle of officers concealing their faces breaking car glass and dragging parents away from infants, terrorizing entire communities and hindering the function of institutions, achieves the opposite effect.

The cycles of calculated hatred—directed at Haitians during the election, Venezuelans this year, and most recently Somali Americans—rely extensively on defamatory falsehoods and insults. The reason is simple: the truthful data about these communities do not justify the animosity.

The Imaginary White Nation Versus Actual History

This campaign of terror and demonization claims to seek at rebuilding a uniformly white United States that is a fantasy. While the US was demographically whiter in the mid-20th century, it never constituted a purely white nation. In 1776, the thirteen founding colonies included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—some southern states had Black populations exceeding a third.

When the United States expanded, annexing Texas in 1844 and seizing Mexico's northern territories in 1848, it incorporated a large community of Hispanic settlers already living across what is now the Southwestern U.S. and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in this land came as part of a Spanish exploration party nearly a century prior to the Mayflower's Puritan passengers landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Population Truths Versus Forced Dreams

The persecution of huge populations of people of color and even mass deportations cannot fabricate the all-white nation of extremist imagination. Los Angeles, for instance, is close to 50% Hispanic, and despite enforcement outrages, detentions and removals, it remains so. The city's very name is Spanish, an ongoing testament of its original inhabitants.

The entirety of this animus and oppression resembles the panic of bigots who pretend they can stop the coming changes of a country no longer majority-white through sheer brutality.

It is coupled with an assault on reproductive rights that is, sometimes, openly intended 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 because of a hard-working population of immigrant laborers which keeps the economy functioning. However, rather than providing the societal assistance that might make raising children easier, the strategy has been based on punishment and force.

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 concerns over falling fertility with opposition to immigration and anti-feminist viewpoints."

In a similar vein, reporting indicates that "efforts to bolster the birth rate do not compensate for broader policies aimed at slashing federal support programs like healthcare for the poor and insurance for kids. This focus on families isn't merely about promoting having children. Instead, it is being weaponized to advance a conservative agenda that endangers the health of women, reproductive rights, and labor force involvement."

Incoherent Policies and Widespread Resistance

The combination of anti-immigration and pro-birth policies represent an attempt to artificially redirect the country's population future. In the end, they represent senseless intimidation by individuals filled with hatred who inadvertently reveal that their claims to superiority must be rooted in race and gender; absent these categories, their arguments collapse into incoherent nonsense.

Much of the justification put forward by the administration fails to align with observable realities and real-world results. For example, naval operations in the southern Caribbean frequently focus on tiny boats not confirmed to be carrying narcotics and not able of making it to the United States. Likewise, Venezuela's role in fentanyl trafficking is negligible, and its involvement with cocaine is far less than that of other South American nations.

The government's position extends to climate issues, with a dismissal of "the science of climate change" and "Net Zero goals." An emotional attachment to fossil fuels, particularly coal, resulting in measures that force communities to invest in obsolete and toxic power sources while sabotaging cheaper, cleaner renewables. Concurrently, public health leadership have promoted anti-scientific dietary schemes while weakening general public health safeguards.

The core premise of the attacks on immigrants is that non-white individuals born abroad are dangerous intruders. However, across the nation—in cities like L.A. and Charlotte, Chicago to Portland—the government's own forces, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom many residents view as the unwelcome, violent invaders.

No symbol is more powerful of the widespread rejection of these tactics than the thousands of people organizing, protesting, facing danger and detention to protect their communities. City after city has risen up in defense of its residents. No amount of derogatory language or intimidation can change that reality.