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Earlier this month, Fabian Schmidt, a German national and a US permanent resident, was released after two months in ICE detention.
Schmidt, who has lived in the US since 2007, was detained by ICE at Boston’s Logan Airport, apparently because of a dismissed misdemeanor marijuana offense. Schmidt’s family says he was “violently interrogated” at Logan. He was reportedly forced to remove his clothes, given a cold shower, denied access to anxiety medication, and kept awake until he collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital.
ICE overreach, violence, and lawlessness is not surprising. But the target of that violence and lawlessness in this case, and in other similar ones, may be a little unexpected. Schmidt is white. So are many others who have run afoul of Trump’s new immigration regime. As Ryan Cooper, the managing of the American Prospect, pointed out, “I did not anticipate ICE goons going after the whitest possible immigrants with American families, jobs, and in good standing legally.”
Cooper’s confusion is understandable. During his latest campaign, President Donald Trump made a point of signaling out non-white immigrants for demonization. He especially targeted Haitian immigrants in Ohio for vile racist slurs. He’s used racist smears against Mexican immigrants since his first campaign in 2016. And of course, Trump this month welcomed white South African immigrants who he falsely claims are refugees from anti-white violence. In a televised meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump trumpeted disgusting racist conspiracy theories to justify his policies.
Trump’s anti-immigrant stance is clearly tied to his white supremacy. And yet, ICE is seizing and according to many reports torturing and mistreating numerous white immigrants — including Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman stopped at a border crossing in Canada, chained, and held in detention for 12 days, and Kasper Eriksen, a Danish permanent resident with no criminal record seized on April 15 and held in a Louisiana detention facility ever since.
This is not a mistake or a confusion on Trump’s part. Rather, Trump’s project, in part, is to redefine and narrow the boundaries of whiteness. Recognizing that can help us to understand Trump’s tactics and exploit his weaknesses.
Most progressives and Democrats understand that race is not a biological reality. It’s a way to categorize and arrange people to the benefit of some and the detriment of others, generally in the name of and to increase the power of established hierarchies.
Since there’s no biological, genetic, or scientific basis for “race,” racial categories and classifications are by necessity arbitrary. There are some Black people who have lighter skin than some white people. Researchers just discovered that Pope Leo XIV had Black ancestors. Does that mean he’s Black? There’s no one right answer, because whiteness and race are determined by social norms and contexts. In some places and some times, Leo might be Black; in others he’d be white, in others he might be considered Creole or mixed. Right now, it’s probably closest to the truth to just say it’s ambiguous.
In short, racial identities can, and do, change over time. Light-skinned Jewish people in Nazi Germany were considered non-white racial others who were banned from marrying “Aryans,” among many other discriminatory policies, ultimately culminating in genocide. In the US, by contrast, light-skinned Jewish people have generally been viewed as white, especially in the last 50 years.
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Similarly, the Irish in Britain and 19th century America were often depicted in illustrations and cartoons as bestial and ape-like — caricatures also used to target Black people and present them as subhuman. Over time (in part by aligning themselves with the white majority against Black people) the Irish ceased to be seen as racial others by white people. Which is to say, they became white.
Just as certain groups can become white over time, it is possible for certain groups to lose their purchase on whiteness. Arab Americans were largely viewed as white ethnics for much of the 20th century. But as the US became more deeply involved in Middle East and Israeli politics, and especially following 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiment spiked, and Arab Americans — especially Palestinian Americans — increasingly became viewed as racial others.
These examples help to underline what a heterogenous, confused concept whiteness is. Being white is about skin color but also about ancestry but also about religion but also about national background. Whiteness is incoherent, ad hoc, and messy.
As one example, Bhagat Singh Thind, a US army veteran and Punjab-born Sikh, argued before the Supreme Court in 1923 that he was white or Aryan according to scientific classifications of the time, and therefore eligible for citizenship. The Supreme Court didn’t dispute this (pseudo) science; instead they said that the “common man” would not consider Thind white, a way to restrict whiteness to certain religions and certain nationalities, regardless of skin color or “science”.
Throughout his political career, Trump has repeatedly leveraged racist stigma against people who would generally be considered white — essentially contesting their whiteness and encouraging his followers to treat them as other or non-white.
One striking, largely memory-holed example is from the 2016 primary, when Trump claimed, falsely, that Ted Cruz’s father had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Cruz is light-skinned, and Cuban Americans have been embraced by Republicans as an important part of their coalition. Nonetheless, Trump’s slur was a transparent effort to frame Cruz as a foreign traitor, and to suggest that his heritage made him un-American.
If that sounds familiar, it’s only because it’s the core element of Trump’s entire political project. He constantly insists that people who aren’t born in the US, or people whose families weren’t born here, are violent, dangerous criminals, drug dealers, rapists. This is the same rhetoric which was used to paint Black people as criminals, justifying lynching in the 19th and 20th centuries and leading to the racial disparities endemic to current American policies of mass incarceration.
It's no accident that Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship is both an attack on Black rights and on immigrants. Birthright citizenship was passed in 1868 as part of the 14th Amendment to establish all people born in the United States as citizens — effectively and deliberately granting citizenship to Black people. The amendment has since become a bedrock of immigration policy — no matter who you are or where you come from, no matter whether your parents are documented or legal residents or citizens, if you are born in the US you are a citizen.
This is anathema to Trump, who believes America is only for citizens who are white people and white people who are citizens. He deliberately and obsessively conflates those categories. That is, in part, because he sees non-white people as non-citizens. (For instance, he told a group of non-white citizen House representatives to “go back where you came from.”)
It’s also why he sees non-citizens as not really white. When Trump targets people like Fabian Schmidt and Kasper Eriksen, you could say that he is embracing bigotry against white people. But you could also say that for Trump, even light skinned European immigrants aren’t really white — or at least, they’re not as white as (racist) white people from South Africa.
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Trump is determined to build walls and then more walls around the borders of whiteness because he believes that he can build power by creating more outsiders and more people to hate.
This has been an effective tactic for him in some cases. But it also creates potential weaknesses. As Republicans make it clear that they consider fewer and fewer people white, those people (and their loved ones and families) may slowly come to realize that they are not welcome in the white identity party, and may start to act, and vote, accordingly.
Trump is alienating portions of his coalition. Democrats can take advantage of that by recognizing that Trump manipulates racism and whiteness deliberately to benefit himself; he’s constantly searching for ways to present his rivals or enemies as non-white, un-American, not in the club.
This isn’t to say that white immigrants like Schmidt face all the same challenges as Latino immigrants. Schmidt could probably walk past ICE agents on the street without being harassed, for example, because they would perceive him as white. But his privilege, and his whiteness, only extends so far — and Trump is reducing the reach of it even more.
As Trump hordes white privilege for a smaller and smaller circle, Democrats can create a larger coalition based not on whiteness, but on solidarity for everyone targeted by fascism. Which, Trump is making clear, will soon be just about everyone.
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