Sixty years ago this October, the 1965 Immigration Act ended racist exclusions and ‘national origins’ quotas (while creating a new Western hemisphere limit), dramatically reshaping U.S. immigration and its politics. In the years to come, a powerful movement emerged from a network of groups founded on White nationalist fears of changing demographics.
As ICE raids tear people from their communities and the Supreme Court clears the way for racial profiling in immigration enforcement, this Fall 2025 issue of The Public Eye scrutinizes this movement now at the heart of Trump’s White House: the anti-immigrant Right.
Together, our contributors place today's policies in a long history of reactionary efforts to make the U.S. a White-majority country; they also reveal how immigrant scapegoating and criminalization is central to Trump 2.0's authoritarian consolidation of power.
In our first feature, journalist and lawyer Jessica Pishko probes Florida’s efforts to be the “tip of the spear” of Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda. The state is expanding its role in federal immigration enforcement by pushing more agencies to join a program that empowers officers to act as de facto ICE agents. Under Trump’s DHS, Florida’s 287(g) expansion deepens the criminalization of immigrants, with consequences for everyone.As Pishko writes, “Despite nominal legal prohibitions against racial profiling, it’s plain that that is exactly what police are doing.” This effort to make deportations part of everyday life creates, as one rights defender describes it, “the feeling of a police state.”
Alongside increased policing, Trump 2.0 greatly restricts immigration to the U.S., with one notable exception. In our second feature, anthropologist Sophie Bjork-James examines the White nationalist ideas behind the administration’s admission of White Afrikaners as “refugees” to the U.S. Looking at how narratives of anti-White persecution and genocide reframe White people as victims, she reveals the racial anxieties that fuel today’s anti-immigrant politics. As Bjork-James writes, “Stories of White victimhood rest on this understanding that Whiteness is inherently fragile and in need of protection.”
In our commentary, scholar Anita Say Chan connects the history of anti-immigrant eugenics to DHS’s tech-driven surveillance of immigrants. As she writes, “The Trump regime’s anti-immigrant strategy builds from this 19th century movement’s playbook, using its tactics to design a system for immigrant surveillance and containment that already appears to be expanding for wider political repression.”
Immigrant detention is a “testing ground for authoritarianism,” as writer and organizer Silky Shah wrote earlier this year, and discusses in this issue’s Q&A. PRA researcher Ethan Fauré speaks with Shah, the author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, about the history of the U.S. detention and deportation system, the administration’s recent anti-immigrant escalations, and insights for resistance.
Our cover features a beautiful watercolor illustration by artist Rob Trujillo. In The Art of Activism, he speaks with PRA about art as a medium for resistance and global solidarity.
As always, between print issues of The Public Eye, visit politicalresearch.org and religiondispatches.org for more of PRA’s research and reporting on the Right.
