A US judge has struck down immigration restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s administration, ruling they unlawfully blocked applicants from 39 countries. The judge said the November 2025 policy left thousands of immigrants in “indeterminate legal limbo” without work or legal status. The judge ruled that the measures unlawfully blocked applicants from 39 countries, mainly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, from receiving decisions on asylum, work permits, green cards, and citizenship applications.
He said the policy had no legal basis and unfairly targeted people because of their country of birth and that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) relied on “pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments.” He stated loud and clear: “USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth.”
Trump and his devilish mandarins like Stephen Miller, do not want immigrants in the US. More precisely, immigrants of colour. Because while shutting the door on everyone by pausing immigrant visas from 75 countries in January, they opened the gates for White Afrikaners from South Africa, and even provided a plane to fly them to the US!
In the first year of his second term in 2025, President Trump systematically reshaped the United States’ immigration system through a series of executive orders and proclamations. These orders are not simple exceptional tools crafted in extraordinary political times in the United States, instead, these seemingly disparate measures reflect historical continuity when examined within the broader context of the country’s violent and exclusionary racial politics and anti-immigrant past.
Trump’s orders, proclamations and their corresponding policies are serving as routine technologies of racial statecraft – embedding Great Replacement (GRT) ideology within the administrative machinery of the US such that it is no longer a cultural conspiracy or fringe ideology. Through legitimising state practice and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions, these measures are serving as administrative rationality.
President Trump’s second coming to the White House signalled the consolidation of Trumpism – an authoritarian populist and white-nationalist Christian project that blends racial grievance, nativism, cultural warfare, economic nationalism, sexism, anti-democratic practices, and, a favourability toward fascist tendencies – as a powerful force in American politics.
Following his victory in 2024, his administration took office with immigration control as its main political priority, drawing heavily on long-existing dynamics of the racialised securitisation of migration ‒ the process through which the migrant is linked with various forms of insecurity including economics, welfare, public health and national security. Bolstered by violent, racist and xenophobic language and influenced by GRT, the Trump administration’s immigration measures – while seemingly an aberration – in fact draw on historical roots of xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant sentiments in the US, aiming to achieve an alluring future based on a glorified and racially hierarchical past.
Serving as a discourse, a pliable political strategy of fear, a white nationalist conspiracy theory, and a narrative, the role of GRT in galvanising Trumpism and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) political movement it has inspired, and in subsequently shaping immigration policies, requires critical engagement.
Fundamentally, GRT proclaims that ethnically homogenous populations in European nations are being ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin through unprecedented migrant ‘invasion’. In the United States – a nation preoccupied by race ‒ reports that the country is poised to become a ‘majority-minority’ country by 2044 has meant that for decades, there has been a discernible demographic panic in some segments of ‘white’ society about the changing racial composition of the country.
Basically, Trump and his people are normalising white dominance as ‘natural’, re-defining who counts as a ‘citizen’, and serving as instruments of demographic engineering to change the socio-political and cultural landscape of the United States. It’s simply racism.
