'Pogrom rhetoric': Experts warn Trump is now openly 'inciting violence' against immigrants

11 October 2024

On Friday evening, former President Donald Trump took to X (formerly Twitter) to post a lengthy tweet promising a brutal crackdown on immigrants across the country. His tweet is now being condemned for both its caustic tone and for invoking a centuries-old law that would allow Trump to round up and detain legal immigrants.

"November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America," Trump wrote. [W]e will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY."

The former president then invoked the names of four women killed by undocumented immigrants before announcing a new anti-immigrant initiative named after Aurora, Colorado, where he hosted a rally on Friday. Trump has become fixated on a story circulating among far-right media outlets about Venezuelan gang members in apartment buildings in Aurora to justify his mass deportations agenda, even though the city's police force and Republican mayor have said repeatedly that there is only "isolated" Venezuelan gang activity in the city of roughly 400,000 people.

"I am announcing today that upon taking office, we will have an OPERATION AURORA at the Federal Level. To expedite removals of this savage gang, I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American Soil," Trump wrote in the tweet. "No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States!"

Trump's tweet was criticized by Washington Post editor Amanda Katz as "plain-old ethnic cleansing/pogrom rhetoric" on the social media platform Bluesky. University of Colorado-Boulder political scientist Alex Newhouse interpreted Trump's tweet as a signal that he would "deputize brownshirts and do his own Kristallnacht," a reference to Adolf Hitler's November 1938 pogrom targeting Jewish people.

"Trump is inciting violence. Whether he wins or loses, there will be violence. Now and then after the election," Canadian political science professor Steven Saideman wrote on Bluesky. "And the blood will not only be on his hands but those who voted for him."

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — one of the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts — would allow a president to target "the natives and citizens of an enemy nation" to be detained and/or deported without trial, based solely on their country of birth. The Brennan Center noted that the law "can be — and has been — wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty and are lawfully present in the United States." The last time the Alien Enemies Act was used was during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration, when he invoked it to detain Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

"Trump's ancestors arrived in America about 100 years after the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, but I suppose there's a chance that JD Vance's Irish ancestors were a target of it back in the day," Willamette University historian Seth Cotlar posted to his Bluesky account. "The Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798 also authorized the gov't to lock up journalists, so that's on brand too."

Cotlar is right in that the law would allow Trump to target journalists. According to the National Archives, the law Trump invoked would make it a crime to "write, print, utter or publish" any "false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States." Violations could be punished with a fine of $2,000 and a prison sentence of up to two years.

On Bluesky, University of Kansas law professor Corey Rayburn Yung observed that Trump "isn't even bothering to distinguish legal and illegal immigrants anymore." And American University assistant professor David Ryan Miller called Trump a "full-throated fascist," citing the recent report by the Independent in which former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley referred to the former president as "fascist to the core."

"He's anathema to everything the United States aspires to be," Miller wrote. "That he and his merry band of authoritarians could retake the reins of the federal government in 3 months is a terrifying prospect."

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