Trump:  Make America White Again

Donald Trump successfully championed anti-immigrant hysteria during his 2024 (re)election campaign … and it worked.  Once in office, immigration became the leading political issue of Trump’s presidency.  

The Department of Homeland Security’s claims a record arrests and deportations since Trump took office. In an April 28, 2025, press release, it claimed that immigration arrests and deportations had “already surpassed the entirety of Fiscal Year 2024 [numbers], and we’re just 100 days into this administration.” 

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, stated in late May 2025 that the administration had deported around 200,000 people over four months; the Department of Homeland Security reported over 207,000 deportations as of June 11, 2025. The New York Times indicate over 200,000 deportations since Trump’s return to office.

Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reports that the Trump administration recorded fewer than 932,000 deportations; other sources suggest a figure closer to 1.5 million deportations.

TRAC reports that “deportations during a similar period [February-May 2024] under President Joe Biden’s administration” 257,000 people were deported.  Pres. Barack Obama deported 3 million noncitizens over his two terms in office. This is, according to one source, “more than any other president in American history.”

In comparison, Pres. George Bush removed about 870,000 people; Pres. Bill Clinton, about 2 million; and Trump about 1.2 million people during his first term.

Trump, like many presidents and politicians before him, knowns that foreign and foreign-born Americans are a perfect target.  And U.S. history is the history of targeting the other as the enemy, often resulting in deportations and/or forced migrations.

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Americas were divided over slavery, not only whether it was immoral if not illegal, but whether to expand it from the South to the new states in the West (e.g., Kansas).  A decade before the Civil War started, the abolitionists were divided over what to do with the slave population, especially when they were freed.  In 1854, future president Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Peoria, IL, arguing:

“I should not know what to do as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.”

When in office in 1861, he ordered a secret trip to the isthmus of Chiriqui in the northern part of today’s Panama to assess the viability of relocating former slaves.  The land was owned by Ambrose Thompson, a wealthy shipbuilder from Philadelphia, who proposed it as a refuge for freed slaves.  As one source notes, “The slaves would work in the abundant coal mines on his property, the coal would be sold to the Navy, and the profits would go to the freed slaves to further build up their new land.”

Most insightful, Zaakir Tameez, a recent Yale Law School graduate, is quoted by New York Times op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie:

The colonization movement proposed abolishing slavery or winding it down over a period and then effectively deporting formerly enslaved people to Africa. The colonization societies could not imagine white and Black people living as equals in this country or African Americans being a political body in this country. So their proposal was just to mass deport them.

Before there were attacks on Mexican and Mexican Americans, Chinese immigrants were singled out.  In the spring of 1882, Congress passed — and Pres. Chester A. Arthur signed — the Chinese Exclusion Act. It banned Chinese immigrating from to the U.S. for ten years.

In the wake of California’s gold rush, thousand of Chinese people immigrated to the U.S. seeking a better life. Michael Luo, writing in The New Yorkers, notes that by 1880, “the Chinese population in the country exceeded a hundred and five thousand.”  He adds, by “the mid eighteen-eighties, during probably the peak of vigilantism, at least a hundred and sixty-eight communities forced their Chinese residents to leave. In one particularly horrific episode, in 1885, white miners in Rock Springs, in the Wyoming Territory, massacred at least twenty-eight Chinese miners and drove out several hundred others.”

Singling out still other immigrants, the U.S. undertook a series of select deportations as part of what’s recalled as the Palmer Raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920.  Adam Hochschild, writing in The New Yorker, noted, it was “the country’s first mass deportation of political dissidents in the twentieth century.”

Pres. Woodrow Wilson ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to capture and arrest suspected radicals, especially anarchists and communists, and deport them. Palmer’s agents, led by J. Edgar Hoover, arrested nearly 10,000 people in seventy cities and deported nearly 600 people, including the anarchist Emma Goldman.

Trump’s rage against Mexican migrants is not the first of such campaign against Mexicans and Mexican Americans.  During the Depression, Pres. Herbert Hoover’s provocative slogan, “American jobs for real Americans,” kicked off a spate of local legislations banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent.  The majority of deportations occurred between 1930 and 1933 as police descended on workplaces, parks, hospitals and social clubs, arresting and dumping people across the border in trains and buses.

As the Guardian reports, “Nearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half U.S. citizens, were deported without due process. Families were torn apart, and many children never again saw their deported parents.”  Deportations took place in border states like California and Texas as well as heartland states like Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio and New York.

If deportation is one way to force unwanted people from the U.S., blocking immigrants is a way of keeping such people out. In June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

As the Smithsonian magazine reminds readers, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt “repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis.” It then quotes FDR: 

“Not all of them are voluntary spies. It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

The belief that refugees posed a serious threat to national security was not limited to FDR but was shared by the State Department and the FBI.  Immigration restrictions tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. As the Smithsonian notes, “Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps.”

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What Trump and many others forget, America was never a “white” nation.

When the first Europeans, be they Spanish in St. Augustine, FL; the Dutch carrying enslaved Africans to Jamestown around 1619; or the English in New England, arrived in what is today’s American, the country was already populated with indigenous peoples.  Enormous efforts were made to irradicate the Native peoples including horrendous wars, mass displacements and forced colonization on reservations.  Native peoples didn’t receive citizenship until 1924.

Often forgotten, at the time of the Revolution, the total population was approximately 2.6 million, of which 566,000 were of African descent and 90 percent were enslaved. As of 2024, the U.S. was a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society of 332 million people.  It was a mixture of non-Hispanic whites = 58.4 percent; Hispanic/Latinos = 19.5 percent; Blacks = 13.7 percent; Asians = 6.4 percent;

Native American/Alaskans = 1.3 percent; and Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders = 0.3 percent.

In just two decades – in 2045 – the U.S. will become “minority majority” nation. During that year, whites will comprise only 49.7 percent of the population.

This well may be freaking out Trump and other white nationalists. He inherited more than money and a real-estate business from his father, Fred Trump.  Father Trump, like his son, did not serve during war – in Trump senior’s case, WW-II — but made a fortune from the postwar housing boom. Few remember that in 1927, Trump the elder was arrested with six other racists at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, NY.  Senior Trump, 21 at the time, was a long-time racialist and, like his son, a real-estate conman.  

On Memorial Day 1927, supporters of Mussolini’s Italian fascism and Klansmen rioted in the Bronx, killing two Italian men.  In Queens, 1,000 white-robed Klansmen marched through Trump’s Jamaica neighborhood, and he was busted.  The white nationalist confronted 100 policemen and, as a local report claimed, “staged a free-for-all.”  Trump senior reportedly wore a Klan robe and, while arrested, no charges were brought against him.

Marx once noted, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”  But what if history repeats itself a third or fourth time? 

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