Trump Immigration Ploy Is A Return To Racial Control Policies

The Trump administration’s latest move on immigration further escalates the right’s power play toward a white nation-state. In particular, the so-called “third world” ban on migration is not about security. It is about control.

It is about preserving a white supremacist vision of America — one that sees Black, Brown, and Asian immigrants not as contributors, but as contaminants.

Using the pretense of the D.C. shooter being from Afghanistan, the Trump administration has begun taking actions against long-term residents and others protected by programs like the Temporary Protected Status (or TPS), including Haitians, Venezuelans, Somalis, and Afghans.

Donald Trump’s declaration to “permanently pause migration from all third-world countries” is not a new policy — it is a racialized revival of exclusionary immigration frameworks that date back to the 1924 Immigration Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act.

The Johnson-Reed Act established a national-origins quota system designed to preserve a white demographic majority. It limited immigration from Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, and Africa. As University of Dayton School of Law Professor Emerita Vernellia R. Randall recently wrote, Trump’s latest actions directly return us to a policy of racial immigration control.

Read this powerful excerpt from her recent essay:

Trump’s public statements blur every legal category—immigration, asylum, refugee admission, visas, family reunification, and work permits—into a single authoritarian impulse: total exclusion. By collapsing asylum, refugee admission, visas, family reunification, and employment migration into a single idea of “closing the border,” Trump erases the legal distinctions that structure the entire immigration system. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a president can suspend entry of certain groups under §§ 212(f) and 215(a), but no president has the authority to shut down the entire statutory scheme. Even Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the Muslim Ban, did not endorse a total freeze. It allowed a targeted suspension tied—however thinly—to articulated security criteria. A blanket ban on entire regions of the world, chosen because their populations are non-white, would face immediate constitutional challenges under equal protection and due process principles. Even if the courts ultimately strike it down, the attempt itself normalizes the idea that a president can sort humanity by race and shut the door on entire regions of the world.

This latest effort is an extension of the racist vision that is Project 2025 and the generational attacks on Black and Brown people by U.S. heads of state. Trump and his political backers are taking the country back 100 years.

Our predecessors knew that, even if something was technically legal at the time, moral authority demanded that we protect human dignity and well-being. White supremacy and projects of racial purity cannot dictate policy and future outcomes.

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