Still about race: white supremacy,immigration politics and Trumpism

Abstract

In the first year of his second term in 2025, President Trump systematically reshaped the United States’ immigration system through a series of executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. This article argues that these EOs and their subsequent policies should not be simply understood as exceptional authoritarian tools in extraordinary political times in the United States. Instead, these seemingly disparate measures reflect historical continuity when examined within the broader context of the country’s violent and exclusionary racial politics and anti-immigrant past. As such, the article argues that President Trump’s EOs, proclamations and their corresponding policies are serving as routine technologies of racial statecraft – embedding Great Replacement (GRT) ideology within the administrative machinery of the US such that it is no longer a cultural conspiracy or fringe ideology. Through legitimising state practice and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions, these measures are serving as administrative rationality. Using a genealogical reading of policies derived from the current EOs on immigration, the article concludes with the implications for the future of multiracial citizenship and belonging in the United States.

Introduction

Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders . . . First, I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came . . . I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country . . . by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will . . . eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil . . . I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions . . .We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.

President Donald J. Trump ¹

President Trump’s second coming to the White House signals the consolidation of Trumpism – an authoritarian populist and white-nationalist Christian project that blends racial grievance, nativism, cultural warfare, economic nationalism, sexism, anti-democratic practices, ableism, and, some have even argued, a favourability toward fascist tendencies – as a powerful force in American politics. ² Following his decisive victory in 2024, his administration took office with immigration control as its main political priority, drawing heavily on long-existing dynamics of the racialised securitisation of migration ‒ the process through which the migrant is linked with various forms of insecurity including economics, welfare, public health and national security. ³ Bolstered by violent, racist and xenophobic language and influenced by the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the Trump administration’s immigration measures – while seemingly an aberration – in fact draw on historical roots of xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant sentiments in the US, aiming to achieve an alluring future based on a glorified and racially hierarchical past.

Serving as a discourse, ⁴ a pliable political strategy of fear, ⁵ a white nationalist conspiracy theory, ⁶ and a narrative, ⁷ the role of GRT in galvanising Trumpism and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) political movement it has inspired, and in subsequently shaping immigration policies, requires critical engagement. Fundamentally, GRT proclaims that ethnically homogenous populations in European nations are being ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin through unprecedented migrant ‘invasion’. In the United States – a nation preoccupied by race ‒ reports that the country is poised to become a ‘majority-minority’ country by 2044 has meant that for decades, there has been a discernible demographic panic in some segments of ‘white’ society about the changing racial composition of the country. ⁸ Such beliefs, together with the dynamics of racialised economics, i.e. the tendency among white voters to interpret economic concerns through a racial lens, ⁹ have continued to shape ideas that ‘whites’ as a ‘minority’ in the future would fare poorly. This is despite the fact that reports of demographic change focus on problematic racial binaries, ignore the way ‘race’ as a category changes over time, misrepresent the complex racial landscape in the US, and do not into account the disjuncture between the Census Bureau’s category of ‘statistical race’ and race as a lived experience. ¹⁰

Since 20 January 2025, President Trump, with considerable American support, has signed a series of executive orders (EOs) in a concerted attempt to address this assumed racial crisis both through reducing immigration particularly from the ‘Global South’ and containing the number of ‘non-white’ immigrants already in the country. Correspondingly, while many of the administration’s actions may seem to be crudely racist and framed as exceptional authoritarian tools at an extraordinary political time in the US, this article argues that the EOs and their subsequent policies should be read as part of a longer genealogy of race and eugenics laws that has always defined the American political project. In other words, President Trump’s EOs both reflect historical continuity and serve as routine technologies of racial statecraft – embedding the Great Replacement Theory (GRT) within the administrative machinery of the US state and advancing a longer project of demographic engineering through subtraction. This in turn means that GRT can no longer be dismissed as a conspiracy theory or a fringe cultural ideology. Rather, working through EOs as a mechanism of population management, it is a force that is legitimising state practice, travelling through the entirety of the US immigration infrastructure, explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions and serving as administrative rationality. Conclusively then, similar to Congressional acts in the past, Trump’s EOs and proclamations are serving to advance what Menzel has called a ‘white epistemology of citizenship’, ¹¹ normalising white dominance as ‘natural’, re-defining who counts as a ‘citizen’, and serving as instruments of demographic engineering to change the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of the United States.

Building the American utopia: locating EOs within the racial architecture of immigration laws

Demographic engineering – the process through which the full range of government policies aim to affect the size, composition, distribution and growth rate of a population ‒ has a long colonial and imperial history. Historically and in contemporary times, its range of policies has included: family subsidies, fertility promotion, anti-abortion measures, and population transfers to capture disputed or new territory; extraction of natural resources; establishment of borders of a sovereign power or the modern nation-state; and creation of a social infrastructure for the expansion of a ‘desired’ population loyal to regimes and amenable to recruitment. Other measures have included tactics of subtraction, i.e. reducing numbers of ‘unwanted’ populations through pro-abortion policies, resettlement and forced removals. ¹² Taken together, these different mechanisms have produced a variety of colonial arrangements: settler colonialism, protectorate colonialism and corporate colonialism with different outcomes. ¹³ For instance, in settler-colonial states such as South Africa, Canada, Australia, and the highly contested context of Israel, ¹⁴ they have produced enduring legacies of exclusionary politics, structural disenfranchisement and political invisibility. In post-colonial contexts as varied as India, Kenya and Tanzania, they have moulded parameters of identity and belonging. ¹⁵ Meanwhile, politics of ‘othering’ in demographic projects continue to shape current migration governance regimes. ¹⁶

Scholars have long argued that the US is an example of a settler-colonial state rooted in racial capitalism where Europeans came in large numbers to claim sovereignty over indigenous territory, while eliminating and displacing Native Americans en masse. ¹⁷ Such an extensive demographic engineering project depended on enslavement on an industrial scale and highly exploitative labour practices; over time, these practices and the systems they upheld generated significant wealth critical to the United States’ establishment as a global hegemon. ¹⁸ A discussion of ethnic and racial preference in America is, however, incomplete without considering the history of eugenics laws in the country, including immigration law, which as the state’s racial architecture aimed at carefully selecting characteristics that preserved the Anglo-Saxon, Christian, heteronormative and able-bodied ideal. ¹⁹ Eugenics pseudoscience rooted in late nineteenth-century social Darwinism, with its emphasis on fitness, competition and rationalisations of inequality, found a ‘natural’ home among North American and European scientists and produced arguably one of the earliest anti-immigrant movements, the Immigration Restriction League, which argued that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture was being ‘drowned’ by ‘inferior’ immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Political and intellectual elites such as President Theodor Roosevelt, who popularised the concept of ‘race suicide’, and President Woodrow Wilson, were persuaded by the argument that modern societies should promote the improvement of the human race through different forms of governmental intervention. ²⁰ By the mid- to late 1920s, this obsession with racial superiority reflected in works such as Passing of the Great Race ²¹ meant that eugenics laws were passed in at least two dozen American states targeting minority and/or lower-income communities. The logical conclusion was as violent as it was standardised: the government carried out large-scale forced sterilisation programmes on racialised communities and people with intellectual disabilities and mental health challenges, deeming them ‘unfit’ for reproduction. By 1936, over 60,000 forced sterilisations were carried out on poor (often Black Americans) and patients in mental hospitals. One of the highest rates of sterilisation was carried out in California, which then served as a blueprint for Nazi Germany’s own programme. ²²

Meanwhile, drawing on the eugenics movement, demographic engineering to establish a desired citizenry was also reflected in the evolution of immigration policy, which since its inception has been shaped by white supremacist ideals and its complex entanglement with transgressive and normative concepts of gender, sexuality, class, age and ability. Consider that the first two anti-immigration legislations were anti-Black and barred ‘non-white’ admission: the 1790 Immigration Act only allowed entry of ‘free whites’; and the 1803 Act prohibited ship captains from bringing any ‘negro, mulatto, or other person of color’ into any state where a state law prohibited their entry. Scholars have also argued that to understand immigration laws of today, it is important to examine the restrictions on African-Americans in the eighteenth century outlined in the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. ²³ These acts served as the genesis of the rationale behind the restrictions that emerged against ‘non-white’ immigrants in the nineteenth century, when federalisation of immigration law began to preserve racialised heteropatriarchal conceptions of marriage and family. The passage of the 1875 Page Act, a precursor to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, targeted Chinese women in particular, suspecting them of trying to enter the US for ‘lewd and immoral purposes’, thereby designating them all as sex workers and participants in polygamous relationships. According to Abrams, the discourse of protecting public morals legitimised how the Act could enable state and federal governments to control local Chinese communities, who were simultaneously seen as ‘racially inferior’, a source for gendered moral panic, and a labour threat for the white working class. ²⁴ The 1882 Immigration Act meanwhile was significant because of its ‘public charge’ rule, which denied admission to any ‘convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge’. ²⁵ In practice, the ‘public charge’ was not only profoundly classist – in terms of preventing entry of those deemed poor ‒ but also highly subjective. Immigration officials would determine the potential economic productivity of an immigrant; those with any perceived physical or intellectual disabilities were barred from entry. Prior to the 1950s, under a system with an embryonic understanding of the excludable category of a ‘homosexual’, individuals assumed to have engaged in sexual acts or occupied bodies and/or identities that were discretionarily deemed ‘perverse’ were classified as undesirable, considered a ‘public charge’ and denied admission. ²⁶ Similarly, the public charge discriminated based on gender; racist assumptions about the hypersexuality of immigrant women of colour, particularly if they were single or unaccompanied, meant they were automatically seen to be economic liabilities for the state and refused entry. ²⁷ In the tumultuous period of the 1920s, the obsession with eugenics took on a new fervour. Following the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, Congress passed the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act ‒ spearheaded by Republican congressional representative and Eugenics Research Association President Albert Johnson – which was a highly restrictive legislation that favoured northern and western European immigrants to ensure the continuation of a ‘white’ racialised hegemony. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act codified and brought together all the nation’s laws on immigration and naturalisation with some significant changes. Race and sex as categories for denying immigration were removed; however, the national-origins quota system of immigrant selection continued, which meant discrimination against Asians did not stop, while no quota was established for western hemisphere immigration. At the same time, emerging at a time of the Cold War within the backdrop of the Lavender Scare – when same-sex sexual behaviour was seen as a threat to national security and American way of life – those classified as having ‘psychopathic personality or mental defect’, including queer immigrants, continued to be excluded from entry. ²⁸

Emerging out of the Civil Rights movement and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the US Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. It removed the longstanding preference for ‘white’ immigrants, made admissions ‘race-neutral’, and opened the door for arrivals outside of Europe. The subsequent diversity of immigrations particularly from Asia (including the Middle East), Latin America and Africa generated complex social, political and economic realities: policies that ensured migrants from countries like Mexico remained undocumented and functioned as cheap labour while work visas were restricted; the number of irregular arrivals increased; the ‘Latino threat narrative’ was amplified; and derogatory language such as ‘invasion’, ‘flood’ and ‘inundation’ became popularised in the media. ²⁹

By the time the ‘War on Drugs’ began, border apprehensions increased significantly, with martial metaphors very much in circulation and public sentiment on immigration turned more conservative. ³⁰ Between the 1980s and 1990s, border enforcement became more militarised with a significant increase in budget, and restrictions on the border diverted migrants through newer and longer routes to an increasing number of destinations. It is within this context that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act emerged to address the ‘immigration emergency’. On the heels of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombings, the US Congress passed both the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), at a time when 65 per cent of Americans supported decreasing the US’s absorption of immigrants. ³¹ The subsequent IIRIRA made possible the establishment of expedited removal of foreign nationals arriving without proper documentation; the expansion of mandatory detention of foreign nationals without paperwork who requested asylum; and the denial of asylum to those who could be returned to a ‘safe’ country. There has been no significant overhaul or comprehensive reform in immigration since that time; however, following the September 11 attacks, legislation super-charged the ‘terrorism-criminality-migration’ nexus, drawing particularly on the long history of racialisation of Islam and Muslims in the West. ³² This not only meant increased surveillance and targeting of Muslims through programmes such as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), but it allowed for arrests, imprisonment and deportation of non-citizens – regardless of status ‒ upon the orders of the Attorney General without judicial review and without presentation of evidence, if they believed the individual might commit or facilitate acts of terrorism. ³³

A look back at the US’s complex history on race, power, and immigration legislation underscores that racialised hierarchy has been embedded into its foundation and has shaped how different political administrations have influenced the ‘white’ identity politics of the country. Arguably, such a hierarchy has also historically supported, and in turn been supported by hateful, dehumanising rhetoric in public discourse and in the media, framing ‘unwanted’ people as ‘violent’, ‘destructive’ and as ‘diseases’ ‒ a reality that is still entrenched in the American vernacular. ³⁴ The EOs and proclamations issued under the first and current Trump administrations therefore need to be contextualised within this broader context of historical continuity of eugenics and immigration politics in the United States.

Locating the racial logic of Trump’s executive orders in US immigration legislation

One of the most common strategic instruments in US government is an executive order (EO), which is fundamentally a presidential directive used to ‘establish policy, reorganize executive branch agencies, declare an emergency, alter administrative and regulatory processes, affect how legislation is interpreted and implemented, and take whatever action is permitted within the boundaries of their constitutional or statutory authority’. ³⁵ EOs are based on existing statutory powers but require no action by Congress, such that US presidents have been known to instrumentalise these documents, sometimes unilaterally, to pursue their own policy agenda including in sociocultural matters. In contrast, US presidential proclamations are general announcements of policy commonly associated with ceremonial occasions and federal observances. ³⁶ While largely symbolic, in two fields – trade and immigration – proclamations have substantive enforcement power. For instance, the ‘suspension clause’ in section 212(f) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act allowed the US President to use proclamations to deny the entry to any ‘alien’ if they were deemed ‘detrimental to the interest of the United States’. ³⁷ Both executive orders and proclamations have the force of law.

While EOs and proclamations have been longstanding mechanisms that allow presidents to circumvent Congress and pursue specific goals, historically, they have not been a heavily used instrument in matters of immigration policy. ³⁸ Studies have shown that Democrats are more likely to issue EOs, and they have been particularly useful during periods of political impasse between the sitting President and Congress to break the log-jam and pursue their own policy agendas. ³⁹ In a 2020 study, Waslin shows that in a sharp departure from previous presidents in US history, President Trump has been the first to use EOs and proclamations extensively as substantive policy-making documents intended to restrict immigration. Stated differently, since 1945 to 2019, of the fifty-six immigration-related EOs and sixty-four proclamations issued, in his first term Trump has issued ten and nine, respectively; however, while approximately one per cent of all EOs and proclamations during the period of seven decades have been immigration related, Trump issued the highest percentage of EOs (8 per cent) and proclamations (2.4 per cent) particularly related to immigration restrictions and border control, making him a veritable outlier. ⁴⁰ Furthermore, the content of the EOs and the accompanying presidential rhetoric, which heavily emphasised and connected immigration to law and order, national security, sexual violence, terrorism, civilisation and underdevelopment, underscore that these instruments were strategically used as mechanisms to subtract immigrants from the desired ‘white’ populace.

White protectionism and demographic engineering: executive orders on immigration in Trump’s first term (2016–2020)

Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was not, as political pundits in their early assessments declared, a referendum on the state of the economy, but an exposé of racialised grievances that had long been simmering in US society. While GRT did not explicitly feature in his campaign trail, his rhetoric on race and immigration, and the enthusiasm they generated, were indications that fringe concerns about a ‘white genocide’, ⁴¹ ‘cultural invasion’ and ‘demographic replacement’, that have motivated racialised killings throughout US history, had started to find a foothold in American mainstream politics. ⁴² In his first term in office, in keeping with his campaign promises of ‘building a wall’, ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US’ and a ‘deportation force’, President Trump signed a series of EOs to halt immigration particularly from the Global South.

His EO 13767 Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements aimed at expanding the use of detention, limiting access to asylum, the construction of a 2,000-mile border wall and enhancing enforcement along the US-Mexico border. While a critical analysis of the emphasis on the southern border and its conflation with crime and irregular migration is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that while the US-Mexico wall only became visible to the American public nationwide during Trump’s first presidential campaign, efforts to control and fortify the border have a history spanning approximately 100 years. ⁴³ Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and particularly since the 1930s, the wall has evolved into a bricks and mortar, steel and wire-fencing infrastructure, serving as a material, symbolic and performative architecture of migrant deterrence, a salve for American anxiety regarding the southern border, while simultaneously revealing its violent, racialised, classed and gendered nature. ⁴⁴ Meanwhile, EO 13768 Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States targeted ‘sanctuary’ cities – a term used to loosely identify states, counties and cities that predominantly lean towards the Democrats and have large immigrant populations, both documented and undocumented – resulting in the adoption of a range of policies aimed at promoting greater collaboration between local law enforcement and immigrant communities. In particular, the EO strengthened cooperation between local–federal immigration enforcement through reinstating President George Bush Jr.’s Secure Communities program – a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiative designed to identify immigrants in US jails who are deportable under immigration law, and Section 287(g) agreements, which authorises Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to delegate state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions.

On 27 January 2017, on the heels of Islamophobic comments ⁴⁵ expressed during his electoral campaign, President Trump signed EO 13769 Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals. ⁴⁶ The EO suspended the US refugee resettlement programme for 120 days; barred entry of people from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen (the list was later extended); indefinitely banned Syrian refugees; established an enhanced screening process for foreign national entry; and tasked DHS to expedite an entry–exit tracking system. ⁴⁷ Each of these policies profoundly impacted the lives of communities of colour both inside and outside the US. For instance, the Zero-Tolerance policy that emerged from EO 13767 Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, and which aimed at restricting asylum at the border, resulted in nearly 3,000 children being separated from their families. ⁴⁸ As many as 1,360 children have not been reunited with their parents, even six years after the implementation of the policy. ⁴⁹ Implementation of the Migration Policy Protocol (MPP) or the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy forced more than 70,000 people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico, often in dangerous circumstances, and subjected them to extensive litigation. ⁵⁰ Meanwhile, the refugee ban meant thousands of refugees had their flights to the US cancelled, resulting in indefinite family separations in many cases. The ‘Muslim ban’ separated families, and produced heightened conditions of discrimination, prejudice and worsened health conditions particularly for Arabic-speaking communities within the US. ⁵¹ President Trump also brought back the 1882 ‘public charge rule’, which was not formerly defined until 1999 by the predecessor to the DHS. Under his administration, the definition – which already included individuals who were primarily dependent on the government for public cash assistance, income maintenance or long-term care ‒ was expanded dramatically to reduce the number of people who were eligible for green cards and other visas, by redefining what made them dependent on government benefits or would make them ‘likely’ to be so in the future. ⁵² In practice, this meant that millions of immigrants who worked across multiple industries including hospitality, food services, manufacturing, construction, and even those with college degrees, were negatively impacted. ⁵³

In sum, in just four years between 20 January 2017 and 20 January 2021, the Trump administration leveraged the growing power of the executive branch to issue 472 immigration-related executive actions, resulting in significant increases in the number of people in removal proceedings; reductions in those applying for permanent residency, and the barring of entry for refugees, asylum-seekers, and legal residents from banned countries. Notably, the vast majority of people fell in the ‘Black’ and ‘brown’ category according to US racial classification. The discriminatory nature of Trump’s immigration policy perhaps was best summed up by a 2018 statement he made (and later denied), where he spoke of Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as ‘s***hole countries’, and added ‘we should have more people from Norway’. ⁵⁴ Despite aggressive restriction, net effects on overall immigration were mixed, with the clearest contraction in refugee admissions. ⁵⁵

Walls beyond bricks and mortar: demographic engineering through executive orders in Trump’s second term

On the first day of President Trump’s triumphant return to the White House in 2025, he signed a flurry of immigration-related EOs, which collectively can be understood as a deliberate long-term strategy to dramatically change the demographic landscape of the country. The implementation of their subsequent policies has been instrumentalised in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’, which through dramatically scaling up investment in immigration enforcement and reducing Congressional oversight has significantly expanded state capacity for demographic subtraction. Below, I classify the measures emerging from the EOs under three broad categories and discuss their intended or realised effects in the broader effort to contain and reduce the presence of ‘non-white’ immigrants in the US. ⁵⁶

Territorial exclusion and border closure

On 20 January 2025, through EO 14165 Securing Our Borders, President Trump revisited a central commitment in his campaign trail to ‘build a wall’ on the US-Mexico border, which in his last year of office had resulted in the construction of 15 miles of new barricades, replacement of 250 miles of existing barriers, and the building of some secondary barriers. ⁵⁷ It is important to note that the US-Mexico wall continued to be built under President Biden, particularly along the Texas border, with the waiving of twenty-six laws and regulations, despite opposition from immigrant advocates, environmentalists and members of the Democratic Party. ⁵⁸ On his first day, President Trump also signed EO 14159 Protecting the American People Against Invasion and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats, which repealed the immigration enforcement priorities of the Biden administration and expanded the dragnet to include all undocumented immigrants, including those who have fallen out of status, or have final orders of removal. EO 14159 dramatically changed the asylum system. First, together with the Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion proclamation, EO 10886 Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States, and the EO 14167 Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States, EO 14159 resulted in the official closure of the southern border, allowed state agencies to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, and imprison those who could otherwise be released while waiting for decisions on their cases. Second, the reinstitution of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy has meant that seeking asylum at the US border is no longer a feasible option. Third, the Customs and Border Protection (CPB) One mobile application process, launched in 2020, which allowed asylum seekers to make an appointment at a US point of entry, has also been cancelled, leaving thousands of asylum seekers stranded in Mexico without any legal status. ⁵⁹ As the Trump administration continues to remove immigration judges, US immigration courts are facing historic backlogs, leaving millions of immigrants and asylum seekers waiting for years for case resolutions.

Immigration enforcement in the US interior: expanding the detention and deportation infrastructure

In continuation of a policy during the first Trump administration, when approximately 1,000 asylum seekers ‒adults and children ‒ were sent to Guatemala as part of a third-country deal, ⁶⁰ the current US government has expanded on these arrangements, signing deals with at least a dozen new countries, including Costa Rica, Eswatini and Uganda. These third-country arrangements are similar to the border externalisation policies being implemented in Europe, which have taken different forms but share the fundamental goal of deterring irregular migrants and shifting migration containment responsibilities to Global South countries. ⁶¹ In the US case, such deals have paved the way for largely Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and African migrants, who are arrested on charges of being ‘undocumented’ or ‘having committed misrepresentation or fraud’ to be deported to these southern contexts.

It is important to emphasise that deportation is not a new mechanism through which the US is attempting to reduce the number of immigrants in the country and deter new arrivals. Expedited removals of ‘unwanted’ people have a long history in the US. It came of age in the 1920s when the government undertook a focused effort to centralise operations around desirable citizenry and to address populations it considered as ‘threats’. Consequently, between 1895 and 2022, and under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the US had removed over 8.4 million people ‒ overwhelmingly people of colour ‒ through different mechanisms including exclusion orders, an archaic public health order termed Title 42, deportation orders and voluntary departure orders. In more recent times, President Obama had received the moniker ‘deporter-in-chief’, having inherited a robust and well-sourced immigration machinery through which he scaled up formal removals of non-citizens, thereby outpacing deportation numbers reached under both the Bush and Clinton administrations. ⁶² Biden and Trump’s first term in office also had comparable numbers of deportations – 1.1 million (by February 2024) and 1.5 million respectively – with 3 million additional expulsions, the vast majority of which took place under the Biden administration under Title 42 between March 2020 and May 2023. ⁶³

During Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign, referencing Eisenhower’s 1954 ‘Operation Wetback’ which deported about one million Mexicans, he promised to launch ‘the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America’, and subsequently invoked the 1798 war-time Alien and Sedition Acts to facilitate his plan. ⁶⁴ According to a 2025 Human Rights First report, between 20 January and 31 October 2025, the Trump administration conducted approximately 10,067 immigration enforcement flights to a record seventy-seven countries – a 79 per cent increase over the same period in 2024 when the Biden administration carried out removals to forty-three countries. Furthermore, the EO directed DHS to expand available detention facilities for immigrants and made it possible for them to be detained until removal. ⁶⁵ The new immigration enforcement budget has also allowed for the ongoing expansion of ICE operations across the US, and deployment of the National Guard to states such as New York and California, and cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Tennessee, Baltimore and Washington DC. This expansion of border enforcement into the interior of the country is, however, not a new development but reflects the growth of an infrastructure that has been expanding since the 1920s. In Nobody is Protected, Jones details how, in 1925, the US border patrol was authorised by Congress to stop vehicles without warrants for immigration inspections within the border zone, to enforce the national origin quotas established in 1924, and how the use of extreme and racist violence in such operations was routine, rather than an exception. ⁶⁶ This has meant the expansion of the border patrol’s operation inland and their steady militarisation, coinciding with the ongoing securitisation of migration, which has unfolded over time with support from the political elite. In the guise of dealing with ‘violent undocumented immigrants’, it has also had support among the American public, who have not necessarily grasped the implications of such expansion for citizens and the rule of law. This becomes painfully clear with regard to, for instance, the 4th amendment, which protects Americans from arbitrary stops and searches, as racialised assumptions of whose is an immigrant –particularly an unauthorised one (i.e. ‘illegal’) – become more salient, along with the conflation of immigration status with criminality. ⁶⁷

Today, the operationalisation of EO 14159 has shredded the criticism raised about racial profiling in large-scale sweeps of undocumented immigrants in the name of ‘national security, public safety and law and order’. Cities in which ICE operations have been launched have several characteristics in common. In addition to their populations heavily identifying as Democrats and/or Liberals, they all have significantly large Black American populations, with notable contingents who are foreign-born, and all identify as sanctuary cities. In September 2025, the case of Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem was enormously consequential given that the Supreme Court’s order overturned a Los Angeles federal court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against immigration patrols questioning and/or arresting people based on racial profiling. ⁶⁸ Even though the Supreme Court’s order is not a ruling, it means that the highest judicial body in the land will now not uphold strict constitutional limits on the authority of immigration agents to stop and question people they suspect to be non-citizens. This ‘greenlighting’ of ICE operations has meant that homes, workplaces, schools, and places of worship, previously considered out of bounds for immigration enforcement, have become sites of violent confrontation, arrests, and even disappearances of people who are Hispanic/Latinx, Asian or Indigenous, based on the racialised assumption that they are undocumented. The dragnet also includes approximately 2 million people overwhelmingly from the Global South, who were recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole – two well-established systems through which people can seek temporary sanctuary in the US – and who now have been transformed into ‘undocumented’ immigrants. ⁶⁹ In some cases, legal residents and citizens are also being caught up in immigration enforcement actions and subjected to detention, arrests, physical and emotional abuse; in a few cases, some have been killed. ⁷⁰

Meanwhile, the largest immigration-detention complex in North America, and in the world, which has benefitted from changes in federal immigration policy under both Democrat and Republican administrations, with a 20-fold growth since 1979 and a 75 per cent increase in the first decade of the twenty-first century alone, is expanding further. ⁷¹ Working with ICE, and driven by powerful private industries such as CoreCivic and GEO Group along with a complex network of subcontracting agencies, the immigration-detention complex serves as an incarceration system, a source of assurance for an anxious American public, a ‘revolving door’ of political actors, a lucrative pipeline for financial profitability, and investment in political campaigns including presidential ones. ⁷² Under President Trump, the detention complex has received an unprecedented $45 billion for new centres despite long-standing criticism about the unhygienic conditions, inadequate nutrition and medical facilities, immigrant abuse, and lack of access to counsel in such facilities, and which also impact upon incarcerated children. ⁷³ Last, but not least, EO 14159 has been used to dramatically change the landscape of higher education in the United States and the potential path that existed for highly educated students to immigrate to the US. While international student status does not automatically translate to permanent immigration, the new regulations, which includes new vetting and monitoring protocols especially for Global South scholars, and severe restrictions on the one-year Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa and H-1 B work visas, have already meant there has been a significant drop in academic enrolment among foreign students in the US. ⁷⁴ In the long-run, these dramatic changes signal significant impact on both the economy and the racial make-up of American society now and in the future.

Reproductive politics, discriminatory policies in entry and selective admission to American citizenship

On 20 January 2025, President Trump signed E0 14163 Realigning the United States Refugee Admission, which, among other actions, suspended refugee resettlement for three months together with the State Department’s Welcome Corp programme and follow-to-join visa programme for refugee families. Since its inception, the refugee programme – and its antecedents – has also served as a means through which the US exercised demographic engineering, i.e. not accepting people based on their need nor solely because of geopolitical calculations, but welcoming people based on the country’s racialised preference. For instance, the passage of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act was highly contentious, with a majority in Congress supporting retention of race-based national origins as a basis of immigrant admissions, including refugee admissions. When the 1953 Refugee Relief Act was passed in Congress, the text and implementation of the act clearly illustrated that a common assumption held among lawmakers and President Eisenhower himself was that the term ‘refugee’ applied only to ‘anticommunist’ Europeans. Consequently, the vast majority of the 214,000 refugee visas reserved at that time were for southern and eastern Europeans; only about 5,000 were reserved for Asians of which 2,000 were Chinese and the rest were for ‘Far Eastern’ refugees. ⁷⁵

Framed as a humanitarian response to displacement and a migratory pathway, the contemporary US refugee resettlement programme was established following the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. It has long been one of the most prominent flagships of the US’s vast immigration system, absorbing about 1 per cent of the world’s de jure refugees through an extensive vetting and elaborate bureaucratic process, making it the world’s largest programme of its kind. On average, since 1980 – the year when it was officially launched – the annual presidential determination number – which sets the refugee ceiling for every year – has exceeded 95,000 people. ⁷⁶ The programme – subject to US geopolitical interests, domestic developments, and decisions of individual presidents ‒ also evolved over time and has seen fluctuations in terms of total number of refugees received per year. ⁷⁷ Correspondingly, presidential determinations about refugee ceilings under different administrations have ranged from a low of 27,131 – after the 9/11 attacks – to 2024’s ceiling of 125,000 refugees per year under the Biden administration. ⁷⁸ In his first term, Trump lowered the annual refugee admissions cap, from 110,000 in 2017 to 45,000 in 2018, and continued dropping it each year. By 2021, his administration had set the lowest refugee cap in US history, at 15,000. ⁷⁹ These cuts had demographic consequences; for instance, because the ban primarily targeted Muslim-majority countries in Asia (including the Middle East) and Africa, US resettlement of Muslim refugees decreased by over 90 per cent between 2016 and 2018. ⁸⁰ Furthermore, the signing of EO 14163 has ensured that more than 130,000 refugees, who were in various stages of the application process and 12,000 who were conditionally approved for travel, were unable to enter the US as the administration suspended resettlement flights. ⁸¹ Trump has also reduced refugee admissions numbers to 7,500 – the lowest in US history. ⁸² Here, E0 14163’s role in pursuing the nativist agenda of demographic engineering becomes particularly evident given that through presidential determination, Trump has established that most of the 7,500 refugees for admission will be white South Afrikaaners – descendants mainly of Dutch colonists – whom he has categorised as ‘refugees facing a white genocide’ in South Africa. ⁸³ This narrative, together with the policy directive, further consolidates GRT’s appeal, which insists that the global persecution of white people is endemic, and the political goal of ‘replacing’ white communities with communities of colour needs urgent intervention.

On his first day of office, President Trump also issued EO 14160 Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, delivering on a campaign promise he had made in 2015 when he launched his presidential campaign. Framed by immigrant hardliners as ‘the biggest magnet for illegal immigration’, ⁸⁴ birthright citizenship has long been a political flashpoint in the US, with debates about whether ‘anchor babies’ – a derogatory term to define children born particularly of undocumented mothers – have the right to American citizenry. ⁸⁵ It would, however, be disingenuous to suggest class dynamics and the politics of the extreme Right in the United States have alone fuelled opposition to birthright citizenship. In a comprehensive 2025 study, Lajevardi and Merolla found that racialised negative attitudes towards undocumented immigrants correlate strongly with favouring a ban on birthright citizenship; that among the ‘white’ identifying population, older and wealthier people were more in support of ending such access; and that across racial groups, those who want birthright citizenship to end were more aligned with Trump. ⁸⁶ Trump’s EO 14160, which applies to children born on or after 20 February 2025, attempts to alter birthright citizenship guaranteed in the 14th amendment by denying it to children of undocumented parents; a father on a temporary status (not a US citizen or permanent resident) and an undocumented mother; and a mother with temporary legal status and a non-citizen or non-permanent resident father at the time of a child’s birth. Since its issuance, the EO has been challenged multiple times in federal courts, with the Trump administration asking the Supreme Court in September 2025 to determine the constitutionality of its birthright citizenship order.

The debate around birthright citizenship, which underscores the jus soli principle drawn from English common law, has historically faced legal challenges. In US early history, jus soli in practice only applied to men who were classified racially to be ‘white’. Following the end of the Civil War, the passage of the 14th amendment in 1868 allowed citizenship to be conferred upon freed enslaved people of African descent, upending the 1857 Dred Scott v Sanford Supreme Court case, which had determined Black people could never lay claims to citizenship in the United States (National Archives n.d.). In 1898, the US v Wong Kim Wong Ark Supreme Court ruling was consequential, given it found that birthright citizenship applies to the children of immigrants. ⁸⁷ In contemporary times, birthright citizenship has been under attack since 1987 with one or both houses of Congress introducing legislation each session to rescind the provision, as well as individual states proposing their own initiatives to end it. President Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship in his second term in office through EO 14160 has already been challenged in the Supreme Court in Trump v Casa, but the future of the 14th amendment remains uncertain especially with regard to children born of undocumented parents. ⁸⁸

Beyond the immediate legal questions around birthright citizenship, it is important to pay attention to what undergirds opposition to the 14th amendment, particularly as it pertains to undocumented immigrants. Opposition to birthright does not only expose Americans’ limited understanding of the immigration system, but also underscores the process of ‘genderacing of the immigrant body’, which legitimises the perceived ‘urgency’ of a socially engineered national project centered on ‘whiteness’. ⁸⁹ In other words, there is the possibility that ‘non-white’ women’s children will claim American citizenship, disrupting the racial hierarchy in the United States and becoming competitors in America’s education and job market, producing racialized anxiety. Stated differently, while immigrant men are framed as economic and security ‘threats’, immigrant women – in the past, Chinese and Mexican – and now more broadly Hispanic, Latina and others from the Global South, pose a reproductive challenge to white supremacist ideologies in their various forms – including white Christian nationalism, white Christian libertarianism and white evangelicalism. ⁹⁰

Such a framing exposes two sociocultural and gendered dynamics fundamental to understanding the racialised history and contemporary context of American society that undergirds this paper. First, the narrative of Latino (male) immigrants as security threats – particularly to ‘white’ American women ‒ revives and strengthens longstanding racial and gendered politics and dynamics of benevolent sexism, in which a superficial protective attitude is extended only to certain women, thereby legitimising restrictive immigration policies, particularly at the southern border. ⁹¹ Racial sexual fears about Black men and the need to protect ‘white’ women defined the conditions for lynching in the US between 1881‒1930, and it continues to shape the racial anxieties that shape neighbourhoods, community and interpersonal relationships even today. ⁹² These anxieties are now invoked with regard to immigrant ‘Brown’ men as evidenced by Trump’s first presidential campaign when he declared, ‘When Mexico sends its people . . . [t]hey’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.’ ⁹³ This persistent belief that the immigrant male constitutes a clear and visible danger to ‘white’ American women and girls has been bolstered by individual cases of rape and murder, building support for closing the southern border and increasing deportations of ‘non-white’ immigrants. Furthermore, in his 2025 proclamation recognising Sexual Awareness Prevention Month, President Trump reiterated one of the most pernicious myths about crime, immigration and ‘non-white masculinity’, stating ‘the previous administration unleashed an army of gangs and criminal aliens from the darkest and most dangerous corners of the world ‒ causing a dramatic increase of sexual violence [emphasis added] in our neighborhoods and communities’. ⁹⁴

Second, the birthright citizenship debate casts the immigrant woman as the crisis. Such a framing simultaneously casts her as a reproductive threat to the white heteronormative Christian family unit, while reifying an idealised notion of white bourgeois motherhood. ⁹⁵ This crisification of the ‘non-white’ woman’s body must also be understood as part of a historical continuity given the US’s past of violent cultural disruption and sexual violence against Native American women; the enslavement of Black women and the extraction of their economic and reproductive labour; the hypersexualisation of Asian women; and the sterilisation and incarceration of Black communities, Asian immigrants, and women with ‘Spanish-sounding’ surnames in California. ⁹⁶ It is also the contemporary iteration of the racialised trope of the ‘welfare queen’ (a ‘lazy Black’ mother with many children), which was introduced by the 1976 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan to attack government cash assistant programmes and appeal to ‘white’, working-class voters. ⁹⁷ While the term has lost political traction over the years, the cultural salience of the racialised woman as an economic liability for the United States endures; today, the Hispanic/Latina is not only a reproductive threat, but an economic one, and has been made the face of the ‘public charge’. Moreover, the obsession with ‘whiteness’ in citizenship has continued to play out in the citizenship naturalisation process. For instance, in a 2022 study, Ryo found that race, religion and gender have remained central in the adjudication of citizenship in the United States, given that

‘non-white’ applicants and Hispanic applicants are less likely to be approved than non-Hispanic ‘white’ applicants, male applicants are less likely to be approved than female applicants, and applicants from Muslim-majority countries are less likely to be approved than applicants from other countries . . . [and] race/ethnicity, gender, and religion interact to produce a certain group hierarchy in naturalization approvals. ⁹⁸

It is within this context that we need to understand the severe cuts to the immigration infrastructure that curtails the possibility of large, and/or ‘non-white’, working-class families to remain or enter the United States. These measures are also deeply connected to racial anxiety around falling birth-rates and the pro-natalist politics that are critical components of the Christian Right political movement. ⁹⁹ Furthermore, they help explain the Trump administration’s programmes aimed at encouraging ‘white’ American women to have more children and its offering of financial incentivisation to do so. ¹⁰⁰ Such measures both resonate with racialised anxieties in Europe regarding immigration of Muslims, Arabs and Africans and the subsequent rise of right-wing populism, and mirror the ‘birth-rate agenda’ of several European countries (Poland, Hungary, Italy and Denmark). ¹⁰¹ In these contexts, native-born ‘right’ (i.e. racialised ‘white’) women are incentivised to grow their families, while immigration restrictions have tightened amid rising Islamophobia, anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-LGBTQ attitudes. ¹⁰² Last, but not least, EO 14351 on the Gold Card visa programme consolidates the current administration’s clear restructuring of immigration around racial and class preferences. While some of its provisions seemingly contradict other current immigration policies and produce certain legal uncertainties, operating outside the traditional statutory framework authorised by Congress, the EO summarily aims to attract ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals’. This means applicants who can contribute non-refundable financial ‘gifts’ to the US government, can now attain permanent residency once their paperwork has been processed. ¹⁰³

Bringing it all together: white nationalism, racialised anxieties and the second era of Trump

The ‘Make America Great Again’ rallying cry in the lead-up to the first Trump administration, which transformed into an actual political movement in his second election campaign, centres ‘again’ as a commitment to revisit (if not recreate) a specific historical era ‒ one in which America was ‘great’. While the actual slogan or any political statement has never clarified what time period is being alluded to, scholars such as Young have argued that the US today, with its virulent nativism, is reminiscent of the period of the 1920s when immigrants made up 13.2 per cent of the population. ¹⁰⁴ At that time multiple insecurities, stemming from an end to the first world war, a health pandemic and anxiety about the demise of the ‘white’ race, not only fuelled xenophobia, ableism and anti-immigrant politics; it also led to federal actions such as the Palmer Raids, where political radicalism served as proxy for the mass detention and deportation of largely eastern and southern European immigrants, who were not considered ‘white’. ¹⁰⁵

Then, as now, elite businessmen, scientists, politicians and intellectuals were active leaders in promoting eugenics and circulating rhetoric that portrayed immigration as a threat to the nation. As of June 2024, when the foreign-born constituted 15.4 per cent of all Americans, the nativist fears of the 1920s have again come to the forefront, with a third of Americans believing in the white conspiracy theory that leaders are replacing ‘white’ people with people of colour, and 61 per cent of Trump voters believing that native-born Americans are being replaced by immigrants and people of colour. ¹⁰⁶ The history of dehumanising rhetoric that informed the racialised securitisation of immigrants (e.g. ‘yellow peril’ regarding Chinese and Asian immigrants; ‘wetback’ to describe Mexican workers in the 1950s) has also become far more palatable. Derogatory terms such as ‘floods’, ‘swarms’, ‘illegals’, remain and are amplified in public discourse, together with new terminology such as ‘tonks’ to describe migrants at the US southern border. Today, the President of the United States, not only uses such derogatory language, but contributes to it through accusing ‘Haitians [of] eating dogs . . . and cats’; and describing Somalis as ‘garbage’, cheered on by members of his own administration. Furthermore, his public vow to halt immigration from all ‘Third World’ countries, citing that ‘the refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America’; ¹⁰⁷ his threat to ‘deport any Foreign National who is a public charge . . . or non-compatible with Western Civilization’; ¹⁰⁸ former DHS Secretary Noem’s call for a full travel ban on ‘every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches’; ¹⁰⁹ and Congressman Fine’s tweet of ‘the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one’, ¹¹⁰ lay bare how violent and racialised logics have moved from the margins to the mainstream and serve as administrative rationales to curtail immigration. Indeed, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, made this very clear in his speech to European allies in Munich in February 2026, lamenting that the United States and Europe had failed in safeguarding ‘western civilisation’ after the fall of the Eastern Bloc: ‘[I]n a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people’. ¹¹¹

At the end of the first year of the Trump administration, the impact of the various EOs and their subsequent policies is being felt across all sectors in the United States. According to a 2026 analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), current policies on illegal and legal immigration is projected to reduce the number of workers in the United States by 6.8 million by 2028 and by 15.7 million by 2035 and lower the annual rate of economic growth by almost one-third. Data from the US Census Bureau in 2026 indicates that changes to immigration policies have already meant a dramatic decline in America’s population growth, triggering concerns about the future of different sectors – economics, trade, healthcare, education and the state of the public debt. While there are discernible signs that some of the earlier enthusiasm about deportations and expansion of ICE operations has waned, ¹¹² there is little clarity on how to move forward in challenging the clear preponderance of white supremacy, the influence of GRT across American society and in its governance structures, and how to effectively respond to the racial cleavages that have been exposed.

This paper serves as a sobering reminder that contrary to assumptions that xenophobic rhetoric and policies only emerged with President Trump and is therefore an aberration, white supremacy has always been an undercurrent in US politics and its immigration system. In examining current developments in the first year of the second Trump administration through the lenses of historical continuity, what emerges is a clear strategy of demographic engineering through subtraction in the face of racial anxiety over the changing nature of America’s sociocultural landscape. Coinciding with these policies is violent, xenophobic discourse that draws heavily on GRT, which in turn shapes EOs and proclamations, serving to legitimise state practice, permeating immigration bureaucracy, refugee policy, deportation regimes and citizenship law, and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions. It is here that the current administration deviates from dominant political practice: more than any other President, Trump has utilised EOs to bypass Congress and is openly trying to deliver on his campaign promises on halting ‘Third World’ migration, in the name of national security, law and order, and, most tellingly of all, racial preservation. Furthermore, in critically analysing the role and influence of GRT in immigration governance, what becomes evident is that the latter is no longer a dismissible conspiracy ideology; rather it both drives and serves as administrative rationality, underscoring how racism has overtly become governance in the United States. As the two faces of America – the one espoused by white supremacy and now Trumpism, and the other national narrative of mythological proportions about the country being a ‘nation of immigrants’ – collide, it is the former’s impact in the form of demographic engineering through subtraction that is dramatically shaping America’s political, economic and social landscape for decades to come.