Friday News Roundup
Donald Trump’s Apartheid Vision for America
I look for patterns in Trump’s activities during the week, but this week, it all seems to boil down to white Christian nationalism, although for Mr. “Two Corinthians” Trump, the white nationalism will always take precedence over any genuine Christian virtues.
On his first day in office in January, Trump completely suspended all refugee resettlement in the United States, but he has now made a sole, unique exception to that by granting refugee status to 54 white Afrikaners from South Africa. The Afrikaner group is not only the ethnic group that includes Elon Musk as a member, but also the group that created and upheld the apartheid system in South Africa.
One of the Afrikaner refugees, a man named Charl Kleinhaus, has already been exposed for his history of anti-Semitic social media posts. In an X post from 2023, Kleinhaus wrote, “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group. They are not Gods [sic] chosen like to believe they are.” He also reposted content from Stew Peters, a white supremacist podcaster who also promotes Holocaust denial.
I believe in the First Amendment. So, I personally believe that spewing hateful anti-Semitic nonsense shouldn't override your rights to immigrate into this country. But that is not the policy of the Trump Administration, especially not the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It is the official policy of DHS to screen the social media of immigration applicants and deny visas based on suspected "antisemitic activity," but in practice, the policy is almost certainly used to attack Arabs, Muslims, and anyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza.
Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University said "Anti-Semitism and any form of anti-Semitism has no place in this movement.", but he is still imprisoned in a detention facility in Louisiana. A State Department memo cleared Rumeysa Ozturk of any links to terrorism or anti-Semitism, but instead, she got kidnapped by masked assailants solely for writing an op-ed critical of Israel. Mohsen Madawi is an Iranian pacifist who converted to Buddhism and publicly intervened against a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs, but he too was detained by ICE at his own citizenship interview. Neither Khalil, nor Ozturk, nor Madawi have a history of anti-Semitic social media posts. By contrast, Charl Kleinhaus of South Africa does have a history of anti-Semitic social media posts, but the Trump Administration gave this Afrikaner refugee status anyway, even though they grant refugee status to no other ethnic group on Earth. The only logical conclusion is that Trump extends special privileges to Afrikaners because he likes apartheid.
Trump's apartheid vision for America not only corrupts our immigration policy, but corrodes all aspects of American government. Trump is committed to a xenophobic vision of America that assumes that the country rightfully belongs to white Christians and that the rest of us are here under sufferance. Even white Christians are not safe if they do not support the autocratic and exclusionary vision of Christianity that Trump's philosophy is based in.
Trump has attacked the rights of legislators. Three Democratic members of Congress (Bonnie Watson Coleman, LaMonica McIver, and Rob Menendez) from New Jersey attempting to tour an immigration detention facility were manhandled by ICE agents and later threatened with arrest by a DHS spokesperson. The footage of the incident is from the edge of the crowd, which makes it difficult to see anybody shoving anybody, but a woman in the crowd does say, "Don't touch her!", which presumably refers to the ICE agents bumping into Congresswoman LaMonica McIver.
Trump has also attacked the independence of the judiciary. Three days ago, a federal grand jury indicted a Milwaukee County Judge, Hannah Dugan, for allegedly interfering with an ICE arrest. Judge Dugan responded in kind by citing Trump vs. United States (i.e., the Supreme Court's case granting immunity to Trump as the POTUS) to argue that her official acts as a judge are legally immune. About three weeks earlier, the Trump Administration also arrested a former Texas judge, Nancy Cano, based on similar accusations of interfering with the Trump Administration's mass deportation policy. These attacks on state judges can also be viewed as consistent with the Trump Administration's attack on the autonomy of local governments, such as the May 9 arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka who entered an ICE facility to enforce a 2021 New Jersey state law that bans contracts with private immigration detention companies in the state.
The xenophobic anti-immigrant policy of the Trump Administration is also massively distorting our country's foreign policy priorities. It is literally the official position of United States that Venezuela is trying to invade America by sending members of the Tren De Aragua gang over our borders. Our government's own National Intelligence Council issued a memo, which showed that claim to be complete nonsense, but instead of listening to reason and heeding the memo, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired two officials at DNI just two days ago for releasing the memo in the first place. This February, J.D. Vance even tried to lecture Germany about how their biggest foreign policy threat is not the neo-Nazi links of the AfD political party or Russia's invasion of Ukraine right on their doorstep, but that their policy is too soft on immigrants.
These intelligence assessments about Venezuela are not just esoterica for foreign policy nerds. A U.S. District Judge in Pennsylvania used the Trump Administration's lies about a fake "invasion" of the U.S. by Venezuela to allow Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for more mass deportations. The fake claims of "invasion" are also the primary basis for the Trump's Administration threats to suspend habeas corpus, a bedrock principle of Anglo-American freedoms since the Magna Carta was signed in the 13th century!