Living through history, the kind of history that you know will make it into the textbooks, is a surreal thing. The threats can be seen approaching for years on end, the parallels to other times in history can be perfectly obvious, and yet there can remain a thin, persistent membrane of unreality between us and the belief that what happened in those other times, those other places, can actually happen to us here.
In late 2016, reacting to Donald Trump’s proposal for a registry of Muslims in the United States, actor George Takei said that the idea reminded him of when his own family was swept up in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, something now regarded by most as a dark chapter in American history. When you look at the comments under any contemporaneous reporting of Takei’s remarks, though, you will see mockery and unbelief.
Now, less than a decade later, massive internment camps are opening across the country, filled not with Japanese-Americans or Muslims, but with primarily Hispanic and Latino migrants – and many of the same people who mocked Takei for his comparison to that earlier chapter of internment, saying he was being overdramatic, are now cheering as the administration fills an internment camp nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” Many have openly expressed their hopes that the detainees will be eaten by the prehistoric predators for which the camp is named.
I say all of this because I had a moment of clarity last week; a moment in which I glimpsed through that thin membrane of unbelief between where we are and where we are going, and saw something I cannot unsee. Maybe that clarity was brought on by the fact that I just read historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, about the men of the Nazi reserve police battalions who carried out much of the Holocaust at gunpoint, even though the first few times made them vomit. Or maybe it was when I saw the new data that – despite the rhetoric – 93% of the people ICE has disappeared have no convictions for violent crime. Or when I realized that they keep vowing to deport 20 million undocumented immigrants even though the best estimates are that only 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the country. Maybe my brief flash of lucidity was triggered by border czar Tom Homan’s admission that ICE is rounding-up people based in part on “physical appearance,” as if anyone can “appear” to be undocumented.
Whatever triggered it, and however far behind or ahead of the times I may be, the realization I had was this: we are witnessing an ethnic cleansing.
To some of you, that will sound dramatic. To others, it will sound perfectly obvious. I think the truth is that it’s both. The initiative being billed as a nationwide effort to enforce the borders and crackdown on undocumented immigrants, when held up against the rhetoric employed by the people masterminding it, bears all the historical hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.
It sounds like the kind of thing which does not happen here – even though it has happened here before – but I think it is happening here, right now. And despite the overwhelming temptation to surrender to the unreality of living through history, to think that the threats are always approaching but never arriving, this one has arrived.
In the popular imagination, ethnic cleansing has become identified with genocide, to some degree, but conflating those two crimes against humanity flattens the scale of depravity involved with each and, in effect, excuses the kinds of ethnic cleansing which are not accompanied by mass killings. In reality, ethnic cleansing is defined as “the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity.”
Racially motivated mass deportations have always met the definition. In the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia convicted Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić and other Bosnian Serb leaders of charges including forcible transfer and deportation. The goal of ethnic cleansing is to remove the “undesirable” population by whatever means necessary.
Despite their protests to the contrary, the population deemed undesirable by the Trump administration is not violent criminals, or criminal undocumented immigrants. That may be the justification right now, but even a cursory look at statements made by Trump and various administration officials makes it clear that the category is much broader than that.
The category, of course, is non-white.
Donald Trump is not a man of many convictions. Capriciousness is one of his defining traits. And yet there is one core belief he has clung to for years: that you are not really American if you are not white.
It was that belief which led pre-presidential Donald Trump to become the ringleader of the racist, anti-Obama “birther” movement, in which the now-president spent years claiming that the then-president could not possibly be a legitimate American citizen. And it was that same belief which led Trump to tweet in 2019 that the four Democratic congresswomen colloquially known as “the Squad” should “go back” to the countries they came from, even though three of the four women were born in the United States of America.
It was Donald Trump’s belief that whiteness and Americanness are connected which led him to tell Time magazine in 2024 that the “anti-white feeling” in this country “cannot be allowed.” “If you look right now,” he told the magazine, “there’s absolutely a bias against white and that’s a problem.”
While campaigning on a platform which was already racist but did not include an open endorsement of ethnic cleansing, Trump constantly talked about rounding up “the worst of the worst,” the undocumented immigrants who are murderers and rapists. Since he took office, that’s what the administration has pretended to be doing: last week, ICE issued a press release saying they were arresting “Child Sex Abusers, Murderers, and Violent Criminal Illegal Aliens.”
But that’s not what they are doing. According to new research from the libertarian Cato Institute, 65% of the people ICE has rounded up have never been convicted of crimes, and a full 93% of them have never been convicted of violent crimes – numbers which stand in stark contrast to claims made by Colorado congressman Gabe Evans last week. At most, 7% of the tens of thousands of current ICE detainees meet the criteria the administration claims to be using. The rest are just brown. We don’t even know how many of them are actually undocumented: border czar Tom Homan admitted last week that ICE can detain people based on physical appearance, like the U.S. citizen who was detained at gunpoint for being “Hispanic-looking.”
The most common justification when these facts are brought up is that crossing the border without documentation is a crime. But it’s a weak justification: many of the migrants being held in internment camps right now were brought to the United States as children, and many of them have actively cooperated with immigration authorities to pursue legal status, working to remedy a “crime” which was committed on their behalf when they were children. That’s why so many of them have been arrested at courthouses, where they were doing exactly what the law required of them. They were not running. They were not hiding.
The argument that entering the country without documentation is a crime does not hold up as a justification for the mass internment of immigrants who crossed the border as adults, either: passing laws to criminalize undesirable populations is a classic hallmark of ethnic cleansing. Despite technically being a misdemeanor since 1929, illegal entry was handled as a civil and administrative matter until 2005, when another Republican president started prosecuting those cases criminally.
One of the reasons we struggle to permeate that membrane of unreality between ourselves and the history barreling towards us is because we struggle to understand that many of the villains of history put as much effort into sounding reasonable and justifiable as today’s villains. We underestimate the extent to which the German citizenry, for instance, was given plausible justifications for the persecution of German Jews prior to the Holocaust.
In 1933, the Nazis passed a law to address the “over-crowding of German schools” – a way for them to winnow the Jewish population in the schools down to 1.5%. It was not until three years later, with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, that the persecution of Jews became the open aim of Nazi legislation. Until then, even though it was clear to most that they were targeting the Jewish population, it was masked in justifications like over-crowded schools. Once 1936 came, the justifications started falling away, and more and more German Jews saw themselves stripped of citizenship.
Trump has already shown that his plans are trending in that direction as well. Last month, the Department of Justice said it would be prioritizing “denaturalization” cases; that is, stripping a naturalized citizen of his or her citizenship. For all that conservatives talk about legal immigrants who “do it the right way,” the administration is seeking to remove citizenship from as many of those immigrants as they can get their hands on.
Then there’s “remigration,” an idea popularized by European neo-fascists, which Trump has started posting about on social media. In the hands of the far-right European parties who have popularized the term, it explicitly means ethnic cleansing via mass deportations. In May, Trump’s State Department announced plans to open an Office of Remigration.
Even as I make the case that the Trump administration has commenced a plan for the ethnic cleansing of the United States, I find myself wanting to dismiss it as hyperbolic – but it’s not. No ethnic cleansing has started without an attempt at justifications. Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad had “reasons” for forcibly deporting and seizing the land of more than 140,000 Kurds. Even Stalin attempted to provide rationales for his brutal forced relocations of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union.
Under it all, there is racial animus. There is Donald Trump’s belief that Americanness, on some level, requires whiteness. Already, we are seeing that the justifications for the ethnic cleansing of America are hollow: 93% of the detained are not violent criminals, stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans has nothing to do with illegal immigration, and detaining people based on physical appearance gives the game away entirely.
Right now, under the guise of those hollow justifications, the Trump administration is building the machinery for a nationwide system which allows anyone – anyone – to be pulled off the street, deprived of due process, and disappeared into a rapidly expanding network of internment camps, oftentimes without family, friends, or lawyers having any idea of their whereabouts or the charges against them.
How long do we think it will take for them to realize what else they can use that machinery for? And what makes us think, after a decade of sprinting forward into the history books – a decade in which the unthinkable became the inevitable time and again – that this is the end of the line, that it goes no farther than this?
