The Radical Honesty of Trump’s Racist New Asylum Policy

In keeping with this administration’s habit of unveiling massive new policies on social media, Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem took to X Monday evening to announce that she was “recommending a full travel ban,” barring visitors from “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation” with persons she called “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” These people are “foreign invaders,” Noem said. “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Like many a post on X, it was an astoundingly direct expression of the kind of lofty bullshitting that circulates among white nationalists and neo-Nazis—only now coming out of an official communication channel for a member of the president’s Cabinet and the head of the wealthiest federal agency. “Our forefathers built this nation,” Noem said in the same post, only for immigrants to “slaughter our heroes” and “snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.”

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The Trump administration seems to be treating the suspect in last week’s shooting, in other words, as little more than a useful scapegoat in the administration’s ongoing war on immigrants. They’re not being subtle about it. {snip}

The current state of the immigration system was ugly enough already. Trump has barred people from 19 countries, mostly in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, according to a report published in August by the American Immigration Council. Since June, he has reportedly been looking to bar entry to people from 36 additional countries. To resurrect this plan now, perhaps in an attempt to move on from the D.C. shooting story, demonstrates that there are few “distractions” when it comes to this administration: only old, bad ideas come back again.

The bottom line is, Trump’s mass deportation machine has not delivered as promised. While the administration has arrested and detained  immigrants in record numbers (and in what look more like abductions), it hasn’t deported millions as initially pledged. So it is doing all it can to further crash the system. On Monday, the Department of Justice fired eight immigration judges in New York so that it may appoint its own. They join the around 90 other immigration judges the administration has fired this year—out of around 600 judges. “The court has been basically eviscerated,” said one judge who was fired last month. On a single day in November, about 60,000 people were locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection, the most in years. At the same time, immigration courts have granted asylum in about half as many cases as they did last year. Whatever rhetoric is coming out of the administration about asylum, they have already got judges to deny thousands more cases, while installing more of their own judges. DHS is now advertising for new judicial applicants on X with the call to “END THE INVASION.”

On immigration, what may appear as distraction or new ideas are often the same old idea. Certainly the racist rhetoric coming from Noem and others in the administration resembles that of white nationalists. But it also highlights something else we have yet to fully reckon with: the mainstream racist ideas that fueled the anti-immigrant laws of the last century. You could drop Stephen Miller into the Congress of the 1920s and he would fit right in. When Trump is gone, he will not be taking every anti-immigrant narrative with him. Some of them have been here for a very long time.