U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss of the District of Columbia on July 2 blocked President Donald Trump’s order closing the border to asylum seekers. In a 128-page statement, Moss ruled, according to New Republic, that the president does not have “the unilateral authority to limit the rights of aliens present in the United States to apply for asylum” or the “authority to adopt an alternative immigration system which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted and the regulations that the responsible agencies have promulgated.”

Trump’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff and chief immigration advisor Stephen Miller reacted with the party line: that Moss was a “marxist judge” attempting to “circumvent the Supreme Court.” He then added a classic Stephen Miller twist: “The West will not survive if our sovereignty is not restored.”

 

Miller’s anti-immigrant fervor is so intense that, according to The New York Times, the president once “said that if it was up to Mr. Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller.” The current population is about 340 million.

Blogger and journalist Amanda Marcotte wrote on Yahoo News that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said a review of 900 of Miller’s emails “illustrated his obsession with whitifying America. He repeatedly denounced legal immigration of non-white people and endorsed the idea that racial diversity is a threat to white people. He longed for a return to pre-1965 laws that banned most non-white immigrants from moving to America.”

And, contrary to what the administration has been saying, Marcotte wrote that mass deportation “has never been about law and order but about the fantasy of a white America” and a “desire to deport his way to racial homogeneity” – white homogeneity, that is..

“The term ‘white nationalist’ is often used interchangeably with ‘white supremacist’ but it has a specific meaning,” Marcotte wrote. “White supremacists think the government should enshrine white people as a privileged class over all others. White nationalists, however, want America to be mostly, if not entirely, white — a goal that cannot be accomplished without mass violence.”

Marcotte, who put Miller in the “white nationalist,” camp, was commenting on immigration protests in June in Los Angeles at which Trump deployed the military. She cited a comment by The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer that “Trump’s mass deportation project is actually a demographic engineering project,” an example being the “expulsion of legal refugees of color while making exceptions to the ‘no refugee’ policy for white South Africans.”

Marcotte noted that Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau justified the Afrikaners exception by saying that “they can be assimilated easily into our country.” That, she argued, is “code for ‘white’” because “thousands of non-white people targeted for deportation have also assimilated. They have jobs. They get married. They have kids. They are part of their communities.” She predicted that “Miller’s whites-only dreams aren’t going to happen, though it’s unclear if he’s delusional enough to think otherwise. … Even if the Trump administration met its unlikely goal of deporting 11 million [undocumented] people, this would still be a racially diverse country by any measure. And it’s becoming more diverse: the non-white population is younger and having more children.”.

The Nation’s Chris Lehman wrote that “a long-standing obsession” of the Make American Great Again movement is “the notion that the members of America’s leadership caste are the righteous guardians of a Western civilization in imminent peril of contamination from within and siege from without.” He added that “the case for racialized exclusion, discrimination and eugenic guardianship has always rested on the myth of a sanitized and glorified racial past.”

But the administration has announced additional measures besides expelling undocumented migrants that could substantially reduce the number of potential and current citizens. “Coming to America and receiving a visa or green card is a privilege,” the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has warned, New Republic reported. “Our laws and values must be respected. If you advocate violence, endorse or support terrorist activity, or encourage others to do so, you are no longer eligible to stay in the U.S.” Who defines “values?”

Further, the president has ordered that children born after Feb. 19, 2025, to undocumented migrants are not to be granted citizenship, although the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stipulates that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” That order, like dozens of others, is in the courts. It could affect hundreds of thousands of potential new citizens. Up to 250,000 children were born to undocumented immigrants in 2023 – nearly 7 percent of all births, the Center for Immigration Studies reported.

Also, the administration will revoke, under some conditions, citizenship already granted. Reports indicate that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has instructed U.S. attorneys to go after anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security.” Again, who makes that determination?

The enabling law was used in the 1950s Communist witch-hunt by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It was invoked again in the late 1970s to unmask Nazi fugitives who falsified their citizenship applications and during the Obama presidency against those who stole the identities of citizens.

DOJ attorneys have been told to file as many denaturalization cases as possible and “the memo is so broad that it could allow the Justice Department to invoke vague or unsubstantiated claims to expel people from the country,” CNN reported. HuffPost estimated that there are about 25 million naturalized citizens, including those who have completed the legal steps for naturalization.

One immediate fallout is that Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee has called on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine whether New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandaborn Muslim naturalized in 2018, should lose his citizenship due to his advocacy for Palestinians and how he listed his race on his college application in 2009.

Further, it may not be far-fetched to suggest that African Americans will be in the deportation crosshairs if the end game is really to “whitify” the population. In fact, those who advocate an ethnically cleansed United States include adherents to the “Lost Cause,” the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War in which the future of enslaved Africans was at stake.

Nativists in power have been adopting policies to thwart affirming the citizenship of descendants of the formerly enslaved. They have been trying to make them disappear through laws designed to erase their history and by scrapping programs involving affirmative action, critical race theory, diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) and other “woke” policies.

Books by acclaimed African American authors are being banned. Their heroes are being maligned and relegated. Their demonstrations against racially motivated injustices are now to be suppressed by the military.

Some may even see an opportunity now to revisit the “back-to-Africa” plan which the American Colonization Society launched to send the formerly enslaved to Africa that led to the creation of Liberia in 1820-1822. After all, the president has floated the idea that certain “criminals” should be expelled, including citizens. That could include African Americans, who are 15 percent of the population but 40 percent of federal prisoners.

And, should all such maneuvers fail to “whitify” America enough, the administration could expand the Afrikaner exemption to include all whites seeking to come to America as refugees from wherever on whatever spurious persecution claims.

Some experts would point out that none of this is exclusive to America but there is an important difference. Unlike the situation in foreign countries, here the nativists have power –for a second time – and they know it is perhaps their best chance of realizing their race fantasies. And they now have $170 billion for immigration enforcement provided in the budget bill that Congress passed and the president signed – even though it could mean cutting a reported $1 trillion from federal food and health assistance programs for the needy – so determined are they to restoring “the myth of a sanitized and glorified racial past.”