AMABHUNU

WHITE "REFUGEES" FROM "SHITHOLE COUNTRIES" 

In a stark and chilling sign of America’s accelerating descent into a techno-authoritarian racist ethno-state, President Trump's administration recently welcomed Afrikaners from South Africa as refugees under a radically redrawn refugee program, claiming they face persecution in their homeland. This decision is strikingly hypocritical given the ongoing existence of Orania and Kleinfontein, separatist towns in South Africa explicitly reserved for whites and founded as strongholds of Afrikaner identity and apartheid nostalgia. While the U.S. government swiftly opens doors for Afrikaners claiming victimhood, it simultaneously weaponizes immigration policy against communities of color domestically—demonstrating that America’s immigration policy under Trump is increasingly guided not by humanitarian values, but by white supremacist ideology.

A NEW ERA OF OPEN RACISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM 

The United States is witnessing an alarming regression into overtly racist, authoritarian policies – a transformation so extreme that some scholars now bluntly describe it as a “white supremacist fascist” movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in immigration policy under Donald Trump’s leadership. From 2017 to 2021—and again in the new Trump administration—immigration enforcement has been weaponized to target communities of color with a zeal and tech-powered efficiency that, in many ways, surpasses the cruelties of the antebellum era. This modern crusade undermines cornerstone civil rights (like the Fourteenth Amendment), uses cutting-edge surveillance to control and expel minorities, and even puts U.S. citizens of color at risk. The tone of activist urgency in this moment is not hyperbole: unless we act, the U.S. could solidify into a dystopian ethno-state reminiscent of history’s darkest chapters.

ERODING THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT—ATTACKS ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

One of the most egregious assaults has been on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, a post-Civil War protection meant to ensure no more Americans would be denied citizenship due to race. (The Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was written to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford and guarantee citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil, specifically including formerly enslaved people and their descendants.) Yet President Trump has explicitly sought to undo this 150-year-old guarantee. Upon taking office in 2025, he even issued an executive order attempting to deny jus soli citizenship to children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents. This order directly contradicted the Fourteenth Amendment and existing law affirming that anyone born in America (with only narrow exceptions) is automatically a citizen. Trump touted it as ending “birthright citizenship” for undocumented immigrants’ kids, but in reality it would even strip citizenship from U.S.-born children of lawfully present visa-holders.

The reaction was swift: civil rights groups and 22 states sued, and federal judges blocked the order as “blatantly unconstitutional”. But the very attempt reveals the agenda—to erase hard-won rights of citizenship for people of color. In effect, this is an effort to revive the logic of the pre-Civil War era (when only white Americans were fully recognized) and the racist antebellum notion that certain people “could not become American citizens”. Such attacks on birthright citizenship strike at the heart of who gets to be an American—and Trump’s answer, implicitly, is to exclude those he deems undesirable in his envisioned ethno-state. 

DEPORTING AND DETAINING U.S. CITIZENS—NO ONE IS SAFE 

Under Trump’s hardline immigration regime, even American citizens are not safe from detention or deportation. In the drive to purge “illegals,” numerous U.S. citizens (often of Latino or Indigenous heritage) have been falsely arrested, jailed, or even deported by ICE. As New York Magazine grimly noted, “It’s not a matter of if U.S. citizens are getting caught up in Trump’s immigration crackdown…but how many.” Attorneys, advocates, and scholars are sounding the alarm, saying these cases “reveal the dangers of a system accelerating with few safeguards.” The authoritarian logic—that anyone can be swept up if they fit a profile—is now reality. In fact, Trump has reportedly been searching for “legal” ways to ship U.S. citizens to foreign prisons. In a chilling exchange with El Salvador’s president about that country’s brutal new mega-prison (CECOT), Trump even joked: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.” This dystopian proposition—exiling American citizens to a foreign gulag—underscores just how far towards fascism we have slid.

Consider a few examples of what has already happened:

• U.S. citizen children as young as 2, 4, and 7 years old have been forcibly deported from the United States under Trump’s policies. In one case, two little siblings (just 4 and 7) were deported to Honduras with their mother – even though the children were born in the U.S.

• A 10-year-old American girl with stage-4 cancer was removed from her hospital and deported along with her family, interrupting her treatment. (ICE officials knew about her condition and still expelled her, depriving a sick child of care in their zeal to enforce xenophobic law.)

• Numerous Indigenous Americans in the Southwest—people whose ancestry on this land often predates the United States—have been detained and interrogated by immigration agents questioning their citizenship. Even a Puerto Rican U.S. military veteran (a Latino American from a U.S. territory) was wrongfully detained by ICE.
  
  

These outrages make one thing clear: the Trump administration’s dragnet does not distinguish citizens from non-citizens when brown or Black people are involved. Families are shattered and Americans of color are effectively treated as aliens in their own country. As one immigration lawyer warned, if the government can deport whoever it wants and courts are powerless to stop it, then “the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them”. This is the reality of a creeping techno-authoritarian state: rights and due process evaporate, and any person of the “wrong” race or politics becomes a target.

IGNORING BLACK DISSIDENTS—THE CASE OF JONAS GWANGWA

To understand the racial fascism taking hold, it’s useful to recall how Western powers have historically treated Black dissidents and freedom fighters. Take Jonas Gwangwa, for example—a renowned South African jazz musician and outspoken opponent of apartheid. Gwangwa spent the prime of his life in exile for daring to challenge a racist regime, using his music as a weapon against white-minority rule. Overseas he was celebrated for his cultural talent, yet he sacrificed a lucrative career to lead the ANC’s cultural ensemble and “win hearts for the anti-apartheid struggle” around the world. His artistic resistance made him a target of the South African regime (at one point he was literally hunted by apartheid’s security forces). 

And how did the so-called champions of freedom in the West respond? For far too long, they ignored activists like Gwangwa and remained complicit with the apartheid government. Powerful Western leaders even obstructed efforts to punish the racist South African state—for instance, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher blocked all moves to impose international sanctions on apartheid. After the CIA, NSA, FBI and  DIA  assisted with the capture of Mandela in the 1960s, during the Reagan administration, Jonas Gwangwa as well as Hugh Masekela were targeted by the FBI, because the South African Botha apartheid government accused them of being communists. In other words, Western powers enjoyed the fruits of Gwangwa’s culture but turned a blind eye to the political message of his struggle. His life story is a cautionary tale: it reveals a pattern of hypocrisy where Black voices are celebrated in word but silenced in deed. Today, as America’s own government slides into open racism, we must remember Jonas Gwangwa’s example. We too have cultural dissidents and truth-tellers—from Black Lives Matter activists to immigrant rights organizers—whom the authoritarian state would like to silence or drive into exile. We cannot ignore these warnings. If Western governments once ignored apartheid’s atrocities, will Americans now ignore the mounting injustices in our own backyard?

EVEN A PRESIDENT COULD BE TARGETED—NO ONE IS IMMUNE

Perhaps the most jarring illustration of this regime’s racist logic is how it treats even the most prominent Black Americans as suspect. Let us not forget that Donald Trump launched his political career by vilifying President Barack Obama—spreading the pernicious “birther” conspiracy which falsely claimed Obama was not really American. This lie was steeped in racism and xenophobia, yet it gained huge traction. In fact, Trump became the “virtual spokesperson” for the birther movement, rallying a base of supporters who were eager to believe the first Black president was a foreign Muslim imposter. Although Obama is of course a natural-born U.S. citizen, millions bought into this fiction. 

Why does this matter now? Because it shows that under the current logic of Trump’s movement, no one—not even a high-profile Black leader—is above suspicion or safe from being “othered.” If a sitting U.S. President could have his citizenship questioned on purely racist grounds, imagine what could happen to ordinary people under mass denaturalization or ideological vetting programs. Trump’s officials have already explored ways to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans who are deemed “undesirable.” The law does allow revoking naturalized citizenship in rare cases (e.g. fraud), and the BBC notes that in theory even accusations of gang or terrorist affiliation could be used to denaturalize someone. A regime bent on creating an ethno-state could abuse this power to revoke the status of political opponents or minority communities. (It’s no coincidence that Trump’s denaturalization push has focused on immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Muslim-majority countries.) U.S.-born citizens cannot legally be denaturalized under current law, but with Trump’s allies openly attacking birthright citizenship and floating the idea of “ideological purity” tests, one shudders to think how quickly the unthinkable could become possible. Today they come for the naturalized “undesirables”; tomorrow they could come for anyone who doesn’t fit their vision of a white, Christian nation—even those born here. The birtherism aimed at Obama was a preview of that nightmare scenario. We must treat it as a siren warning us of what’s at stake if we allow mass disenfranchisement to take hold.

RESISTING THE SLIDE INTO FASCISM—PROGRESS FOR ALL

The United States stands at a precipice. The “techno-authoritarian fascist ethno-state” that once seemed like a dark fantasy is materializing before our eyes—through racialized immigration crackdowns, erosion of constitutional protections, high-tech surveillance of marginalized groups, and the stoking of nativist fervor at the highest levels of government. In some respects, this new system is even worse than antebellum-era repression: it wears the cloak of legality, it leverages modern technology for social control, and it operates on a nationwide scale. The very fabric of a multi-racial democracy is being shredded. We cannot afford apathy or half-measures. 

Now is the time for action. We must call on all people of conscience to resist this creeping authoritarianism with every tool at our disposal. This means demanding robust protections for birthright citizenship and rejecting any attempts to undermine the Fourteenth Amendment. It means standing up when American citizens are unlawfully detained or when families are torn apart—insisting that the rights of everyone, citizen and immigrant alike, are honored. It requires shining a light on cases like Jonas Gwangwa’s to expose how racial oppression thrives when good people do nothing. And it absolutely means speaking out against the racist conspiracy theories and demagoguery that fuel this ethno-nationalist project, whether they target a former president or a refugee at the border. 

History will judge us by our response to this moment. Will we surrender to fear and bigotry, allowing the United States to tumble fully into fascism? Or will we rise in solidarity—Black, brown, and white, immigrant and native-born together—to reclaim the promise of equality and justice for all? The answer must be the latter. We have the power to halt this descent: through organizing, voting, protesting, and supporting policies that uphold human rights. America does not belong to one race or one faction; progress is for all, or it is for none. Let us unite and ensure that our nation moves forward toward inclusion and liberty, not backward into tyranny. The stakes could not be higher – and the time to act is now. 

Stand up, speak out, and resist. Together, we can dismantle the architecture of hatred and build an America that truly lives up to its ideals, an America where no one’s humanity is denied. The future of our democracy, and the soul of our nation, depend on it.