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.”
Noem’s post is part of a desperate scramble by the Trump administration, as it attempts to move on from the inconvenient facts around last week’s shooting in the nation’s capital. Last Wednesday, an Afghan immigrant who worked alongside the CIA in the Afghanistan War, and who had been granted asylum in April, allegedly shot two National Guardsmen as they were patrolling the city, killing one and wounding the other. The accused was also shot, and in a virtual court hearing from his hospital bed on Tuesday, he pleaded “not guilty” to one charge of first degree murder.
The National Guard would not have been on the streets in Washington in the first place had the administration not ordered them there as a political stunt in August, claiming they would fight a “crime emergency.” (Trump said nonsensically on Tuesday that, thanks to him and those he deployed, Washington now had “no murders.”) But Trump, Noem, and other strident anti-immigrant administration figures like Stephen Miller have spent the last week using this tragedy to promote anti-immigration sentiment among the public. The day after the shooting, Trump announced that the administration would review all green cards for every immigrant from a “country of concern.” On Friday, it stopped processing all visa applications from Afghanistan, as well as ordering immigration officials to stop approving, denying, or closing open asylum applications from Afghanistan. And on Tuesday, it elaborated on the travel ban Noem had teased, stating it would bar people from at least 30 countries from entering the U.S.
On Sunday, the administration’s narrative began to crumple on Meet the Press. When asked what the federal government knew about the alleged shooter’s motive, Noem said that they “believe he was radicalized since he’s been here in this country.” But having no additional evidence about him, she wandered far afield from his case. “We do know that we will never allow this to continue to happen in our country,” Noem promised. Vaguely, she referred to “individuals who came to our country, that were unvetted by Joe Biden, allowed to run free and loose,” who would be “brought to justice” and “returned” if they “aren’t here for the purposes of being an American.”
If you press even a little on any of these claims by Noem, like a blazer that only holds up on camera, they come apart. This asylee, said Noem, was not yet “radicalized” when he entered the country. Instead, she said Biden was responsible for alleged criminal behavior that followed years later. Noem wanted to represent this case as a failure of the immigration system, but even if it was true that he was not “vetted,” how was the vetting supposed to have identified “radicalization” that Noem also claims hadn’t happened yet? The host rather mildly raised the fact that as a CIA contractor, the man would have undergone “extensive vetting” at the time of his service to the United States, and then asked Noem why a DHS agency, USCIS, had approved his asylum application in April of this year. “Did you know then that he was moving toward radicalization?” Noem did not answer the question, even when asked again and again. The country has been “infiltrated,” she insisted, going even further into white nationalist rhetoric.
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. And, true to form, when Trump lackeys fail to gain traction with a particular narrative, or when they falter, they quickly pivot, from one racist trope to another.
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.