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It's real. Donald Trump is racist. And his racism is now on full display as driving U.S. policy to whitefy America. He doesn't want people from "shithole countries" where black or brown people live to come to this nation of immigrants, he wants people from predominately white countries, like "Norway," in his words.
"Why do we need more Haitians?" he asked, as U.S. senators briefed him on a potential fix for some 800,000 Dreamers who have been left in limbo since he set a deadline to rescind their protected status. (The White House has issued no direct denial of this reporting and Sen. Dick Durbin has confirmed it.)
Trump's most recent vile slur is simply the perpetuation of the nativist smears he launched his campaign on in 2015—declaring that Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and criminals.
And if you put Trump's words against the policies being prosecuted by his administration, it amounts to nothing short of ethnic cleansing. Here's the Merriam-Webster definition:
the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity
People are understandably cautious about this term—it harkens back to some of the darkest days of the 20th century and the mass killings executed by brutal dictators. But we are not talking about genocide here, which necessarily means the “deliberate and systematic destruction” of a people. And whatever aversions we have to tagging an American president with potentially heading down a very dark path, we must not turn away from what is taking place right before our eyes: The Trump administration, informed by the views of Trump and his coterie, is systematically expelling immigrants of color from this country and trying to prevent more from coming in.
If we define ethnic cleansing as the “expulsion” of a minority, immigration lawyer David Leopold told me, then the term "fits.”
Leopold tweeted out a thread last week detailing the administration's policies—the Muslim ban, cranking up mass deportation efforts, family roundups, gutting due process at immigration courts, ending deportation protections for Dreamers, ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, Salvadorians, Sudanese and Nicaraguans.
"I think it's undeniable that the immigration policy of the U.S. government targets immigrants of color," he adds.
Leopold is well aware of the pitfalls of using a term like "ethnic cleansing"—his family fled Nazi Germany and some of his ancestors were killed at Auschwitz. “This is not Germany in 1933,” he says, “but we have to remember that there are certain similarities.”
For instance, when the Department of Homeland Security published its first “weekly list of crimes” committed by immigrants last March, he says, it was a direct descendent of the Nazi campaign to paint Jews as unfit or unhealthy or criminals. "That's right out of the Nazi playbook," he says.
“The thing about [Trump’s] remarks, the racism, the hatred," Leopold says of his latest comments, "those are not just off-the-cuff remarks by Trump. Those racial slurs are ruthlessly being turned into U.S. immigration policy by people like Stephen Miller and others that have been appointed to the administration in cahoots with some of the most extremist, anti-immigrant groups in the country."
Donald Trump has been using disparaging, racist smears against people of color since Day One of his campaign. The work of systematically dehumanizing certain groups of people has been the precursor of every major human atrocity from slavery to the Holocaust, and we now have a president who is—in plain sight—using the U.S. government as an instrument of his bigotry. We can no longer afford to deny this reality if we are to stop its escalation.