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As Donald Trump's influence wanes and his public demeanor becomes more erratic, he has intensified vitriolic attacks aimed at female journalists and ethnic communities, including Somali immigrants as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from the animosity behind them and his position, not any basis in truth. In a parallel manner, the government's actions against immigrants are poorly executed and driven by misinformation. It is abundantly clear that the objective is not targeting individuals with criminal histories. The assault is directed at people of color.

This includes Indigenous peoples carrying tribal IDs to naturalized US citizens, individuals performing critical jobs in building sites and hospitals to military veterans, college students, residents asleep in their beds, and very young children: a wide array of the country's population is under siege.

"Immigration enforcement raids are brutal, inhumane and do nothing for public safety," asserts a leading political figure from New York. Scenes featuring officers concealing their faces shattering windows and separating parents from children, terrorizing entire communities and hindering the function of institutions, achieves the opposite effect.

These waves of orchestrated bigotry—directed at people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelans this year, and most recently Somali Americans—rely extensively on libelous lies and slurs. This is because: the actual facts about these communities do not justify the animosity.

The Mythical White Nation Versus Actual History

The strategy of frightening and vilifying claims to seek at recreating a homogeneously white America which is a fiction. While the US was demographically whiter in the mid-20th century, it never constituted a purely white nation. At the nation's founding, the thirteen founding colonies included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—some southern states were over one-third Black.

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 long established in what is now the Southwestern U.S. and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in territory that became the U.S. came as part of a Spanish exploration party almost one hundred years prior to the Mayflower's English Puritans landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Population Truths Against Coercive Fantasies

The persecution of huge populations of brown-skinned individuals and attempts at large-scale expulsion will not manufacture the all-white nation of far-right dreams. A city like Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and despite enforcement outrages, arrests, and deportations, it remains so. The city's very name is Spanish, an ongoing testament of who was there first.

All this hatred and persecution looks like the fear of racists attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country that is ceasing to be predominantly white through sheer brutality.

It is coupled with an assault on reproductive rights that is, at times, openly intended to encourage white women to have more children. The rationale cites a fertility rate below replacement level in the US, a phenomenon less severe than in other countries because of a hard-working population of immigrant laborers which keeps the economy functioning. Yet, rather than providing the social support that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the approach is punitive and coercive.

A prominent journalist observes that the policies on childbirth of certain political figures—coupled with derogatory comments toward childless women—constitute a form of pronatalism. This philosophy "typically merges concerns over falling fertility with anti-immigration and anti-women's rights viewpoints."

Similarly, reporting indicates that "efforts to bolster the fertility rate cannot make up for wider administrative priorities designed to cut government assistance initiatives like Medicaid and insurance for kids. The so-called 'pro-family' focus is not just for encouraging procreation. Instead, it is utilized as a tool to push a right-wing political program that endangers the health of women, bodily autonomy, and economic participation."

Contradictory Strategies and Widespread Resistance

The combination of anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies represent an attempt to artificially redirect the nation's demographic trajectory. In the end, both amount to foolish bullying by proponents of hate who unintentionally demonstrate that their claims to superiority must be rooted in race and gender; absent these categories, their arguments collapse into meaningless idiocy.

A lot of the reasoning offered by the Trump team does not match up with observable realities and actual outcomes. For example, maritime attacks in the Caribbean Sea often target small vessels not confirmed to be transporting drugs and not able of reaching US shores. Likewise, Venezuela's role in the fentanyl trade is negligible, and its involvement with cocaine is much smaller than that of other South American nations.

The government's position extends to environmental policy, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "carbon neutrality targets." An emotional commitment to fossil fuels, especially coal mining, resulting in measures that force communities to spend money on obsolete and toxic energy sources while undermining affordable, clean alternatives. At the same time, health officials have advanced anti-scientific dietary schemes while weakening broader health protections.

The foundational assumption of the attacks on immigrants is that people of color not born in the US are threatening outsiders. Yet, from coast to coast—in cities like L.A. and 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.

There is no clearer sign 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 stood up in defense of its residents. All the insults or intimidation can change that reality.