The ethnic cleansing of the US will destroy it | Heba Gowayed

A rally on affordability in Pennsylvania on 9 December devolved into a racist tirade when Donald Trump said to the crowd: “We only take people from shithole countries. Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? … From Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”

Referring to the US representative Ilhan Omar’s hijab as a “little turban”, Trump continued: “She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out.” His supporters erupted in chants of: “Send her back.”

The rant is abhorrent and factually incorrect, but it does hold one truth – the Trump administration’s vision for the United States is one of a white Christian nation. And the path to accomplish it is through the exclusion and removal of all who do not fit that vision – in other words, through ethnic cleansing.

To that end, Trump and his acolytes have increasingly been using the term “reverse migration” and even proposed an “office of remigration”. The idea, borrowed from white supremacists in Europe, understands immigrants as an inherent threat to the identity of what they imagine to be “white” nations. Immigrants’ forcible and systematic removal – remigration – is envisioned as a way to “restore” that whiteness.

This vision of an ethnically cleansed, white US is being enacted in policy.

Contrary to Trump’s ranting, the United States did in fact restrict admission to only include white, European immigrants by law through much of the past century. Racial quotas were only abolished through Black activism and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Whether immigrants are welcome or not has always been an issue of racial inclusion in this settler colonial state – it is the mechanism by which we decide who belongs in this nation.

Today, the Trump administration is closing immigration pathways by which people enter the US, and gain status when here. Asylum is dead. Resettlement is cancelled except, tellingly, for white Afrikaners. Temporary protective status, which protects people from deportation due to turbulence in their nations of origin, has been or will be cancelled for Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Syrians and others, leaving hundreds of thousands of people deportable to countries the US recognizes as unsafe. Fees for all immigration processes have sharply increased.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is exploring how to block pathways to citizenship for people who qualify. Citizenship ceremonies are being cancelled as people are being pulled out of line while waiting to take their oaths. Mohsen Mahdawi was detained on 14 April at his citizenship appointment for his participation in a civil pro-Palestinian protest at his university.

Trump issued an executive order to cancel birthright citizenship – the mechanism by which formerly enslaved Black Americans became citizens – that has made its way to the supreme court. And he has said he would “absolutely” denaturalize American citizens if he could.

While this commentary seems bombastic, it is not without precedent in United States history, where in the first half of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of people were denaturalized due to politicized accusations of fraud, lacking “good moral character” or having “racial ineligibility” (ie not being white).

These current policies sit against the backdrop of the grotesque expansion of the mass deportation system. In September, two months after the so-called Big Beautiful Bill was passed – adding $75bn to ICE’s budget, giving it a bigger budget than all but seven of the world’s militaries, and making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government – the supreme court authorized ICE officers to racially profile people.

This makes every person of color, regardless of status, a potential target. And, in a nation that remains segregated by race, where people of color often live apart from white people, ICE is terrorizing communities of color.

US citizens have also been caught up in ICE raids: members of the Navajo and Mescalero nations; a Black man in Chicago with his birth certificate in his backpack; a 20-year-old in Minnesota of Somali origin who kept trying to show ICE officers his passport, only to be forced by officers to undergo a facial scan to prove his citizenship. The investment of millions of dollars in cybersurveillance technology – which can hack phones in a certain radius and uses AI to recognize faces and places – presents a violation of privacy for every single person in this country regardless of race or status.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric that once justified deportations has been revealed as a lie. Data shows that the vast majority of immigrants detained have no criminal record. Concerns of the fiscal burden that immigrants pose (never actually borne out in data) are shown for their absurdity when Trump says there is “no price tag” on his mass deportation agenda. Somalis added $8bn to Minnesota’s economy, though their contributions should have no bearing on their humanity.

There seems to be joy in the cruelty, when Trump trolls “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” as we watch men and women dragged from the arms of their children, sobbing. Many of them are sent to privatized detention centers rife with human rights violations that turn a profit on human lives – incentivized to limit healthcare, food and comfort to detainees to maximize shareholder profit.

But it is not just through the physical brutalization that this ethnic cleansing is being executed. There is also violence in systematic disinvestment that disproportionately cuts essential lifelines for Black and brown people. The Big Beautiful Bill rolls back social spending, denying millions of people healthcare coverage, food benefits and welfare benefits. It enacts policies that exacerbate burdens of student debt. It raises the budgets of police and carceral facilities.

The idea that those who cannot be removed should be subjugated is alive in our academic institutions, through attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, on students’ right to dissent, on affirmative action.

The strength of this imperfect nation, which has never repaired for its original sins of genocide and enslavement, is in the incredible diversity of people who make it great, in the freedoms it claims to uphold – of life, liberty and justice. This ethnic cleansing can only be accomplished through the destruction of all of the above, in ways that touch the lives of each and every person within the nation, American or not.