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As the political power of Donald Trump diminishes and his behavior grows increasingly volatile, he has intensified vitriolic attacks aimed at female journalists and ethnic communities, with Somali Americans as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from their malice and his platform, not their factual accuracy. Similarly, his administration's offensive 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 assault is directed at people of color.

From Native Americans carrying tribal IDs to naturalized US citizens, individuals performing critical jobs in building sites and hospitals to those who served, college students, 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," 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 disrupting schools and businesses, achieves the opposite effect.

The cycles of orchestrated bigotry—directed at people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelans this year, and now Somalis—lean heavily on defamatory falsehoods and slurs. This is because: the actual facts about these communities do not justify the animosity.

The Mythical Nation of White People Versus Actual History

The strategy of frightening and vilifying purports to aim at rebuilding a uniformly white United States which is a fiction. While the US was demographically whiter in the youth of today's white supremacists, it never constituted a purely white nation. At the nation's founding, the thirteen founding colonies included a significant percentage of African and Native American individuals—some southern states had Black populations exceeding a third.

When the United States expanded, taking Texas in the 1840s and acquiring northern Mexico in 1848, it absorbed a vast community of Hispanic settlers already living across what is now the Southwestern U.S. and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in territory that became the U.S. arrived with a Spanish expedition nearly a century before the Mayflower English Puritans reached the shores of New England in 1620.

Population Truths Versus Coercive Fantasies

The persecution of huge populations of people of color and even mass deportations will not manufacture the ethnically pure country of extremist imagination. Los Angeles, for instance, is close to 50% Hispanic, and despite enforcement outrages, detentions and removals, it remains so. Its name itself 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 through sheer brutality.

This is paired with an attack on abortion access that is, sometimes, explicitly designed to encourage white women to bear more babies. The argument points to a below-replacement birthrate in the US, a trend less impactful than in some other nations because of a young, industrious immigrant workforce which keeps the economy functioning. Yet, instead of offering the societal assistance that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the strategy has been based on punishment and force.

An noted writer notes that the policies on childbirth espoused by figures like JD Vance—coupled with derogatory comments toward childless women—constitute a form of pronatalism. This ideology "usually combines concerns over falling fertility with opposition to immigration and anti-feminist ideas."

Similarly, analyses show that "attempts to raise the fertility rate do not compensate for wider administrative priorities aimed at slashing government assistance initiatives like healthcare for the poor and children's health insurance. This focus on families is not just for promoting having children. Rather, it is being weaponized to advance a conservative agenda that threatens women's health, reproductive rights, and labor force involvement."

Incoherent Policies and Public Rejection

The combination of anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies constitute an effort to artificially redirect the country's population future. In the end, they represent senseless intimidation by individuals filled with hatred who unintentionally demonstrate that their assertions of being better must be rooted in race and gender; without these constructs, their positions devolve into meaningless idiocy.

Much of the justification put forward by the administration fails to align with tangible facts and actual outcomes. As an instance, maritime attacks in the Caribbean Sea frequently focus on tiny boats not confirmed to be carrying narcotics and incapable of reaching US shores. Likewise, Venezuela's involvement in the fentanyl trade is minimal, and its involvement with cocaine is far less than that of neighboring countries on the continent.

The government's position extends to environmental policy, with a dismissal of "the science of climate change" and "carbon neutrality targets." An emotional commitment to fossil fuels, especially coal mining, leading to policies that force communities to spend money on outdated and polluting power sources while sabotaging cheaper, cleaner renewables. At the same time, public health leadership have promoted unscientific nutritional plans while eroding general public health safeguards.

The foundational assumption of the anti-immigrant offensive is that non-white individuals born abroad are dangerous intruders. Yet, from coast to coast—from Los Angeles to Charlotte, from Chicago to Portland—it is the administration's own agents, immigration enforcement personnel, whom many residents view as the dangerous and hostile interlopers.

No symbol is more powerful of the widespread rejection of this approach than the countless individuals organizing, protesting, facing danger and detention to defend their neighbors. City after city has stood up in protection of its people. All the insults or intimidation can change that reality.