After two national guard members were ambushed in Washington DC last week, killing one and leaving the other in critical condition, Donald Trump went on a hate-filled social media rant and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries”.

Trump’s late night Thanksgiving posts devolved into a fury, evidently because the suspected gunman is an Afghan national. He had worked with the US government, including the CIA, and was evacuated to the US in 2021 after the American military withdrew from Afghanistan.

The president lashed out at millions of immigrants, painting them as “illegal and disruptive populations” and he pledged to “end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens”. Trump also proclaimed that US citizenship should be stripped from naturalized immigrants “who undermine domestic tranquility”, and called for deporting those he deemed “non-compatible with western civilization”.

Within hours of the shooting on 26 November, it became clear that Trump and several of his top aides would use the tragedy not only to collectively punish thousands of Afghans in the US, but to further intensify the administration’s crackdown on immigrant communities across the country. After the Wall Street Journal warned in an editorial against blaming all Afghan refugees for the violent actions of one man, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s nativist immigration policy and White House deputy chief of staff, retorted on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration.” Miller added: “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies … At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

Trump and Miller’s grandstanding obscures an inconvenient reality: it was the US that largely broke

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