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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 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 haphazard and founded on falsehoods. It is abundantly clear that the goal extends beyond targeting those who have committed crimes. The true target is people of color.

This includes Indigenous peoples with official tribal documentation to American citizens by choice, from essential workers in construction and healthcare to military veterans, college students, 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 community security," asserts a leading political figure from New York. The spectacle of officers concealing their faces breaking car glass and separating parents from children, terrorizing entire communities and hindering the function of institutions, achieves the opposite effect.

The cycles of calculated hatred—focusing on people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelans this year, and most recently Somali Americans—lean heavily on defamatory falsehoods and insults. The reason is simple: the truthful data about these groups of people do not justify such hostility.

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 youth of today's white supremacists, it was never exclusively a "white country". At the nation's founding, the thirteen founding colonies contained a substantial percentage of African and Native American individuals—some southern states were over one-third Black.

Following American expansion, annexing Texas in 1844 and acquiring northern Mexico in 1848, it incorporated a large Spanish-speaking population long established in the modern Southwest and California. Historical records show the initial Muslim of African descent in territory that became the U.S. arrived with a Spanish expedition nearly a century prior to the Mayflower's English Puritans landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Population Truths Versus Forced Dreams

The systematic targeting of vast numbers of people of color and even mass deportations will not manufacture the ethnically pure country of far-right dreams. Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and regardless of aggressive enforcement, arrests, and deportations, it remains so. The city's very name is Spanish, an enduring reminder of its original inhabitants.

The entirety of this animus and oppression resembles the panic of racists who pretend they can halt the demographic future of a country no longer majority-white by using pure cruelty.

It is coupled with an assault on reproductive rights that is, sometimes, openly intended to encourage white women to have more children. The rationale cites a below-replacement birthrate in the US, a phenomenon less impactful than in other countries because of a young, industrious immigrant workforce that sustains the economy. Yet, rather than providing the social support that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the strategy has been based on punishment and force.

A prominent journalist observes that the policies on childbirth of certain political figures—along with insults toward childless women—constitute a form of pronatalism. This philosophy "usually combines worries about declining birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-women's rights ideas."

In a similar vein, analyses show that "attempts to raise the birth rate cannot make up for broader policies designed to cut federal support programs like Medicaid and children's health insurance. The so-called 'pro-family' focus isn't merely about promoting having children. Instead, it is being weaponized to push a right-wing political program that endangers the health of women, reproductive rights, and labor force involvement."

Contradictory Strategies and Widespread Resistance

Together, the anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies constitute an effort to artificially redirect the nation's demographic trajectory. In the end, both amount to senseless intimidation by individuals filled with hatred who unintentionally demonstrate that their claims to superiority must be rooted in race and gender; without these constructs, their arguments collapse into incoherent nonsense.

A lot of the reasoning offered by the Trump team does not match up with tangible facts and actual outcomes. As an instance, naval operations in the Caribbean Sea frequently focus on tiny boats which are not proven to be transporting drugs and incapable of making it to the United States. Similarly, Venezuela's role in fentanyl trafficking is minimal, and its involvement with cocaine is far less than that of neighboring countries on the continent.

The administration's stance extends to environmental policy, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "carbon neutrality targets." There is a sentimental commitment to coal and oil, particularly coal, leading to policies that compel localities to spend money on obsolete and toxic power sources while sabotaging cheaper, cleaner renewables. Concurrently, health officials have advanced unscientific nutritional plans while eroding general public health safeguards.

The core premise of the attacks on immigrants is that people of color not born in the US are threatening outsiders. Yet, from coast to coast—from Los Angeles to Charlotte, from Chicago to Portland—the government's own forces, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom local communities view 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 protect their communities. Municipality after municipality has stood up in protection of its people. All the insults or intimidation can change that reality.