For months, many Indian Americans said that they had noticed what seemed to be a marked uptick in racist comments against South Asians in some corners of social media.
But two recent incidents have left some in the community wondering whether the anti-South Asian hate that they thought was a fringe sentiment was perhaps not so fringe after all.
As part of the rollout of a new tip line to report truckers suspected of fraud, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image on Sept. 9 of a “Transformers” character facing off with a Sikh man, along with the words: “America for Americans. Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.” Singh is a common surname for followers of the Sikh faith.
A few days later, Bo French, a Republican candidate for statewide office in Texas, posted an image from a University of Texas football game showing cheering students who appeared to be of South Asian heritage. He wrote: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
For many, the posts confirmed an uneasy sense that the immigration debate has led to rising animus against people of South Asian descent and that it has crept into mainstream American politics, particularly on the right.
“What we’re seeing now is full blown and out in public view,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, co-director of Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit that tracks discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “When agency officials and candidates use this language, it gets weaponized and utilized by those who are perpetrating hate.”
There was backlash to the posts and some backtracking. Mr. French later said that his post was “not about race, it’s about policy,” specifically what he believed to be an admissions policy that favored international students over Americans. (By state law, 90 percent of first-year students at the University of Texas at Austin must be in-state residents.) Mr. French did not respond to a request for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security said that its post was a depiction of Harjinder Singh, an Indian citizen accused of causing a high-profile fatal crash in Florida last year. It later removed the image without explanation.
A few days later, on Sept. 13, a Sikh trucker named Gurvinder Singh was stabbed 17 times at a Wyoming rest stop. Many Sikh Americans couldn’t help but draw a connection to the heightened rhetoric.
“Before, nobody cared about your race, nobody cared about your color, but now it’s a problem,” said Harinder Singh Dhanoa, 71, a Sikh American trucker based in Sacramento who has been driving trucks for more than 40 years. “They look at you different.”
In a statement, the Homeland Security Department said that any attempt to blame the agency for the Wyoming attack was “RECKLESS” and “FALSE.” It called criticism of its deleted post “nonsensical drivel.”
While the stabbing may have been a rare episode, it fueled fear, leaving many South Asians wondering about their place in the United States.
They are not alone. The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement has hit the Latino community especially hard. Rhetorical attacks on Muslims by some Texas officials have recently surged.
For some people who trace their heritage to South Asia — which includes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — the rhetoric has been surprising, in part because many had embraced the stereotype, however problematic, of their community as a “model minority.”
Indian Americans are among the wealthiest demographic groups in America, the most highly educated and the most civically engaged, according to AAPI Data, which collects statistics about Asian Americans. While they make up only 1.5 percent of the country’s population, they are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups and have become increasingly visible in pop culture, business and politics. Prominent Trump administration figures of Indian descent include Kash Patel, Harmeet Dhillon and Usha Vance.
But lately, some South Asians have found themselves wondering whether that success is now a double-edged sword, especially when economic anxieties are high.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-endorsed tech entrepreneur running to become Ohio’s first governor of Indian descent, addressed the concerns in an opinion article last year. Criticizing the rising vision of American identity based on heritage, he said, “My social media feeds are littered with hundreds of slurs, most from accounts that I don’t recognize.”
For many South Asians, the concerns have intensified as the Trump administration has sought to restrict legal and illegal immigration, and federal and some Republican state officials have repeatedly accused immigrants of taking jobs from Americans.
A dominant theme in the recent surge in online hate speech has been the xenophobic narrative of an Indian “invasion” or “great replacement,” according to a recent report from Stop AAPI Hate.
“It feels like everybody is looking at Asian Indians now with a little bit of skepticism,” said Shiva Peram, 52, a naturalized American citizen who immigrated in 1997 from India.
Mr. Peram moved to Frisco, Texas, about a decade ago, drawn by the warm weather and the top schools for his two sons. He felt safe in the Dallas suburb and voted for President Trump twice because of concerns about illegal immigration, part of a recent rightward shift among Indian Americans, who mostly vote Democratic.
That began to change late last year when Frisco, with a fast-growing South Asian population, became the epicenter of a right-wing furor over H-1B visas, a skilled worker program. In 2023, around three-quarters of the 400,000 or so approved H-1B applications were for workers from India, according to Pew Research Center.
Since then, Mr. Peram said he often found himself overthinking everything. Were people at Costco smiling less at him? When the Caucasian teenagers harassed him and his friends at the volleyball court, were they acting out of racism or were they just acting like kids?
“It’s always in my subconscious,” Mr. Peram said.
Beyond Frisco, some people of South Asian descent said they had heard about growing racism but had not felt an impact in their daily lives.
“I have not seen it become more prevalent,” said Satinder Bharaj, 61, a Sikh American and longtime resident of Ohio.
To some, the animus felt worse after the Sept. 11 attacks, when many South Asians — particularly Sikhs, whose turbans are a visible marker of their faith — were the target of widespread racial profiling and hate attacks.
But Pawan Dhingra, an American studies professor at Amherst College, said that in some ways, events today were more troubling. After Sept. 11, Mr. Dhingra said, the primary concern was about terrorist threats and loyalty to the country. Many Arab Americans and South Asian Americans could respond by flying the American flag and denouncing terrorism.
But Mr. French’s University of Texas post, he noted, attacked students who were celebrating their team’s victory while wearing school colors and cowboy hats. What could be more American — and Texan — than that?
Some people, he said, are worried about a threat to their overall culture and their way of life.
“That is a much deeper fear,” he said. “You can’t wear or say anything that’s going to mitigate that fear.”
Rahul Kodali, a senior majoring in computer science, was one of those students wearing a cowboy hat whom Mr. French later referred to as “foreigners.” Mr. Kodali was born in Syracuse, N.Y., and grew up in Flower Mound, a suburb of Dallas.
In an interview, Mr. Kodali said international students were not a “problem,” emphasizing that most people he knew had come legally and worked hard.
Mr. Kodali said he had not experienced any racial discrimination before this incident and seemed equally at ease talking about his love of the Dallas Cowboys and his favorite childhood Indian meals.
But after Mr. French’s post, he said that he had to reassure his mother that she should not regret her decision to raise her children in the United States.
“I told her, ‘I never feel that way, so don’t ever worry about that,’” he recalled.
For many Sikh truckers, the recent events have felt personal.
Some Sikh truckers said that while they supported boosting safety measures in the industry, the Trump administration was embracing policies that disproportionately affected immigrant truckers, like a rule that limits certain immigrants from obtaining truck driver’s licenses. They worry that the Homeland Security Department’s new fraud tip line could encourage racial profiling.
And, they say, the administration seems to be seizing on fatal accidents involving immigrant drivers as pretext to further crack down.
Now there are also fears about physical safety. After Mr. Singh, the Sikh truck driver, was stabbed at a rest area near Rock Springs, Wyo., the police arrested a man but they have not disclosed a motive. The county sheriff’s office declined to discuss the case, citing its ongoing investigation.
In a phone interview last week, from the hospital where he was recovering, the driver said that he did not know why he was attacked. But he wonders whether the Homeland Security Department’s recent post — “You can’t drive Mr. Singh” — may have played a role.
“What is being built up in people’s hearts,” Mr. Singh asked, “that they would want to do something so terrible to another human being?”
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