In the final hour of a holiday that in popular culture memorializes the breaking of bread between Native Americans and their eventual colonizers, the U.S. President offered a Thanksgiving message on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday night that excoriated the country’s 53 million immigrants—including those who came legally—falsely claiming that “most” of them “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”
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Donald Trump went on to announce that his Administration would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States,” “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Trump’s message came in the wake of a shooting in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that killed one National Guard member and critically wounded another. As details emerged about the suspected shooter, an Afghan national who was granted asylum earlier this year, Trump and his Republican allies have doubled down on tying the tragedy to Democrats’, including former President Joe Biden’s, immigration policies.
“This is one of the most important messages ever released by President Trump,” the White House’s Rapid Response account on X said of Trump’s Truth Social message, which also included calling Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “seriously retarded” and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D, Minn.) “the worst ‘Congresswoman/woman’ in our Country” as Trump complained about Somalian refugees in their state and blamed refugees more broadly as the “leading cause of social dysfunction in America.”
Trump’s message has sparked speculation of a new and more expansive so-called travel ban and an intensification of the Administration’s already underway mass deportation effort.
The Trump Administration has been targeting both legal and undocumented immigrants since the start of Trump’s second term, including by implementing tighter restrictions on student and work visas, revoking visas on the grounds of what it deemed divisive speech,, and increasing scrutiny of tourists and visitors. Trump has also previously threatened to look into denaturalization proceedings of political rivals.
Earlier this week, the Administration said it would reinterview all refugees admitted under Biden and announced that it would restrict certain lawful immigrants’ access to housing programs. Last week, the Administration proposed giving immigration officers the power to refuse permanent residency to lawful immigrants who make use of Medicaid and other public safety net programs.
And Trump already effectively banned or restricted the entry of nationals from 19 countries in June, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, and placed the U.S. refugee admissions cap at a record-low of 7,500 for next year. After the Wednesday shooting, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it would review the immigration status of lawful permanent residents and green card holders from those 19 countries, including Afghanistan, and give immigration officers the authority to weigh “country-specific factors as significant negative factors” when considering immigration requests from those countries’ nationals. USCIS also said in a post on X that it had indefinitely stopped the “processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals … pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”
At the same time as he posted his Thanksgiving message, Trump also posted a photo on Truth Social with the caption, “This is part of the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked. We will fix it, but will never forget what Crooked Joe Biden and his Thugs did to our Country!”
The photo, taken by the U.S. Air Force in 2021, shows over 800 Afghan citizens being evacuated during America’s chaotic withdrawal from the country. Trump’s first-term Administration initiated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan through an agreement with the Taliban in 2020, which Biden initially delayed before carrying out, to bipartisan criticism for its rushed manner that left many Afghan partners scrambling and in some cases left behind.
Immigrant and refugee advocacy groups feared backlash from both the government and others after the shooting. “Those who would twist this moment to attack Afghan families aren’t seeking safety or justice—they’re exploiting division and endangering all of us,” Shawn VanDiver, president of nonprofit AfghanEvac, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Even as we pursue accountability, one individual’s alleged actions cannot be allowed to define, burden, or endanger entire communities who had no part in this tragedy,” Ashraf Haidari, the founder and president of refugee advocacy organization Displaced International, said in a statement on Thursday.
Even the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal said Thursday that Afghan nationals “shouldn’t be blamed for the violent act of one man. Collective punishment of all Afghans in the U.S. won’t make America safer and it might embitter more against the United States”—to which Trump’s deputy chief of staff and unofficial architect of anti-immigration policy Stephen Miller responded later on Thanksgiving Day: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
“Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL,” Trump concluded his Thanksgiving message, “except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!”
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