In 2024, the United States admitted 100,034 refugees, giving people from violence-torn countries a safe home and a new start.
Things have changed in Donald Trump’s second term. In fiscal year 2026, the US has admitted a total of just 12,904 refugees. Three of these were from Afghanistan, back in November of 2025. Since then, every single refugee admitted to the United States—12,901 of them—have been white South Africans.
If 99.97% of our admitted refugees being white seems like an explicitly racist policy, that’s because it is. And it shouldn’t be surprising: this administration, and the GOP as a whole, is positively teeming with racists from top to bottom.
I understand this sounds like an extreme and possibly libelous claim, and I don’t make it lightly. Before we dive into the proof I have to offer, please understand that I had to wade through and leave out much more than I’ve been able to include, just for the sake of brevity.
This is a tweet from this past New Year’s Eve, from the official account of the Department of Homeland Security (the department which oversees ICE):
One hundred million deportations, in a country of 340 million. An interesting number, since there are only around 14 million undocumented people living in the US. If you add immigrants living here legally, you get to a total of around 24 million noncitizens living in the country. So, even if you deported every single noncitizen in America, those here legally and illegally, you’d still have to deport 75 million citizens to meet this goal. Coincidentally, 100 million is much, much closer to the total population of black and Hispanic people in this country (roughly 112 million) than the population of undocumented aliens.
DHS has refused to take down the post.
Earlier this month, DHS posted this:
The man depicted, Harjinder Singh, is a real person. He is a truck driver who entered the country illegally and later was charged in a traffic accident that killed three people. While obviously tragic, most people viewing this image have no idea of the back story, and simply see a Sikh man depicted as an enemy and told to “get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.” (Three days after this post appeared, a Sikh truck driver with the surname Singh was beaten and stabbed 17 times by a white man at a truck stop. It’s unclear whether the attacker was inspired by the post.) Then there’s “America for Americans,” a phrase beloved and popularized by the Ku Klux Klan.
DHS scrubbed the post after it received significant backlash.
Less than two days after Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent, the agency made a recruitment post featuring the title of the song playing behind their ad: “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” It’s a song featured almost exclusively on explicitly neo-Nazi and white nationalist channels—it’s virtually impossible for someone to have come across this song unless they were frequenting those circles.
DHS quietly removed the post after reporters questioned them about the racist song.
This ICE recruitment post from August echoes a popular meme among white supremacists: “Which Way, Western Man?” It’s the title of an explicitly racist and antisemitic book by a neo-Nazi in the late 70s, long considered a foundational text among his fellow racists.
I could go on; there’s more. In fact, earlier this year a police bulletin circulated to departments throughout the nation warned that the racism in ICE’s recruitment posts is so obvious to white supremacists that it could potentially incite them to violence.
But there’s too much more to cover. Let’s consider the things prominent Republicans are comfortable saying in public.
Republican Congressman Brandon Gill from Texas, in an interview with Benny Johnson (a conservative influencer whose parent company was paid $10 million by Russia to exacerbate divisions in America and promote Russian interests), agreed with Johnson that, “Like, the average IQ in Somalia hovers around 70, and that’s the threshold for mentally-handicapped…” Gill concluded that Somali immigrants are a “net drain” on the economy and society.
The study these men approvingly referenced to paint Somalis as intellectually deficient was done by a self-identified “scientific racist,” whose entire study included solely Somali children living in a refugee camp after fleeing war, having received little to no formal education in their lives. It has been repeatedly discredited by scholars, but is a favorite among white supremacists.
Republican state Congressman Travis Corcoran posted a screenshot of an email sent by a Jewish Democratic colleague and commented, “We need a final solution for theater kids in politics.”
Republican Congressman Andy Ogles posted this in March:
Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, in an interview with Benny Johnson—the Russian asset, remember him?—said that “inner city rats” are living off the federal government. Tuberville also posted this on 9/11 of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
Mamdani was nine years old when New York City was attacked on 9/11.
On the 4th of July, a South Dakota Republican Representative posted this:
He later deleted it, but did not apologize.
Laura Loomer, right wing activist and longtime friend and supporter of the President, tweeted this about “Alligator Alcatraz,” the immigrant detention facility in Florida:
There are 65 million Hispanic people living in the United States. And remember: there are only 14 million undocumented people living here. She also tweeted that we should “deport every Muslim in America back to the Middle East,” and called them an “invasive species.”
A Republican candidate in Texas made this post earlier this month:
To their credit, when the post went viral, many Republicans publicly denounced his racism. But days later, the official account of the US Department of Education posted this not-so-subtle endorsement:
White supremacist Nick Fuentes’s blatant racism and sexism, not to mention his Holocaust denial and outright praise of Hitler, caused him to be largely shunned by conservatives for years. (A tiny sample of his commentary from last year: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it’s that simple.”) But things have changed since Trump was re-elected. In October, Tucker Carlson gave Fuentes access to the largest audience he’s ever enjoyed—over 4 million—when he interviewed him on his podcast. Carlson told his audience that Fuentes is “bigger than ever,” and “it would probably just be worth hearing what Nick Fuentes thinks.”
Some conservatives criticized Carslon for platforming Fuentes and giving him such a softball interview. But Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation (prominent conservative think tank behind Project 2025), went to the trouble of posting a video defending Carlson, saying that “canceling” Fuentes is “not the answer.” (He did face a huge amount of backlash, and later apologized.)
Joel Tenney is an Iowa pastor and outspoken Trump supporter who gave the invocation at a Trump rally in 2023. Tenney first read Mein Kampf at age 13. He believes all Jews must be forced to leave the country, and says of America, “We were white and racist for the longest time. We need to go back to that.” He rode with white supremacist Jake Lang at his infamous recent “N*** March” in Minneapolis. He’s been a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and attended Turning Point USA’s (Charlie Kirk’s organization) “Inaugural Eve Ball” for Trump’s second inauguration. He doesn’t seem concerned about harming the president he so enthusiastically supports with posts like this:
Curtis Yarvin, a conservative blogger whose work has been read by JD Vance, and who is friends with billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel, reposted a screenshot from a particularly horrifying screed on Superbowl Sunday. Yarvin corrected the poster that he should have written “goyball” instead of “goy ball.” (The Yiddish word “goy” has become a popular antisemitic dog whistle among white supremacists.) The full original post included the following:
“Remember when you are sitting there watching how fast Blacks can run, Jews are systematically raping your children and blackmailing your politicians.”
“The commercials are where Jewish advertising agencies show homosexuals and mixed race couples to destroy your people.”
“So enjoy the goy show! …Jew Robert Kraft has more massages to buy.”
As shocking as all of these are, prominent Republicans are simply following the example of their leader. Trump spent the final days of his campaign spreading what his team already knew were lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, and nothing has changed. His favorite target recently is Somalis, especially since a number of people of Somali descent—mostly US citizens—were implicated in a massive fraud case in Minnesota. He speaks of this entire nationality with unvarnished racism. His direct quotes about these people include:
“They contribute nothing.”
“We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country.”
“These aren’t people that work. These are people that do nothing but complain.”
“And they’re low IQ. I can generalize. They’re low IQ people.”
Please note that generalizing about a race and concluding they are inferior is the definition of racism.
In April, he posted a video of Somalis in Minnesota enjoying the Mall of America, with no caption, but set to the song “Mad World.” Because he is a racist.
Or consider the time he was discussing undocumented farm workers, and said of the difficult manual labor, “These people do it naturally,” and went on to bizarrely claim that they “don’t get a bad back,” because, “if they get a bad back, they die.” Not only does he believe these immigrants are specially designed to be field laborers, he first claimed, “People that live in the inner city are not doing that work…And they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried. They don’t do it.”
In an especially indefensible move, his administration tried to prevent a nonprofit organization from helping new citizens register to vote. It took a federal court order to stop him.
Racism is not only a problem at the top of this party, however. That would be easier to solve. No, this issue goes straight down to the roots in the GOP.
After Charlie Kirk was killed, the secretary of Miami-Dade county’s Republican party started a group chat with other conservative students, including student leaders at Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Within three weeks, the chat was filled with a breathtaking spectrum of hate: racist slurs, fantasies of violence against black people, proud antisemitism, and Nazi references. Around the same time, the University of Florida disbanded its College Republican Club when members performed the Nazi salute.
Lest you assume that these events were isolated to Florida, the same thing happened last year when a Telegram chat amongst leaders of Young Republican groups across the country leaked. Their private messages were a smorgasbord of gutter racism and shameless antisemitism, and “jokes” about slavery, rape, and gas chambers. And even that abhorrent episode was simply a repeat of the same thing happening in North Dakota in 2022.
Last year, the leader of the neo-Nazi Aryan Freedom Network said of Donald Trump: “[he has] awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years. He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”
At a Trump rally last month in Nevada, a portion of the crowd broke into audible boos as soon as the Republican governor mentioned “Officer Abdelnabi.” The nonplussed governor told them, “No, no. We’re not booing him. He’s the officer that passed away here recently.” He then announced a moment of silence for the slain police officer, a Marine veteran shot and killed in the line of duty. I’ll leave it to my readers to infer why this Republican crowd booed a man about whom they knew absolutely nothing, except his surname, “Abdelnabi.”
When it comes to what attributes make someone an American, 3 in 10 Republicans say that being white is somewhat or very important. That’s double the percentage of independents who say the same, and more than four times that of Democrats.
I’ve thrown a lot at you today, so I want to be clear about the point I’m making. I am not claiming that all Republicans are racists and neo-Nazis. Of course they’re not; the majority are not. In fact, my hope is that some of them are reading this in disgust as they learn about what’s happening in their party.
My point is that all the racists and neo-Nazis are Republicans.
And they’re not a tiny fringe anymore; they’re clearly a significant minority. Dear reader, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and I’ve just shown you far too much smoke to ignore.
My conservative friends, I ask you to consider, really consider, why these people feel at home in your party. Why they feel so emboldened. Why they believe this administration is on their side, and this president is “the best thing that’s happened” to them. Why they and their poisonous ideologies have not been forcefully and permanently ejected from your ranks.
I’m not saying Democrats are perfect; they’re not. (They have their own issues with race, and I look forward to the day when I again feel free to focus on my differences with them.) I’m not even asking you to vote for Democrats in November—although I think that is the correct response. If you, like me, are appalled and repelled by racism, I’m asking you to put your ballot where your conscience is.
I’m asking you to refrain from voting for the Republican Party until it stops being a magnet for neo-Nazis.
What we can do:
Stop giving racists and racist-friendly platforms your clicks—even hate-clicks. Don’t feed the monster. And in November, send a message. Even if you can’t bring yourself to vote for Democrats, at least withhold your vote for Republicans. Coming off of 2 years of complete power in DC, the party will have to feel a serious, devastating rebuke in order to make changes and jettison their worst elements. Give it to them.
