Following the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers on Wednesday, President Donald Trump on Thursday night published a statement announcing that his government would “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country,” “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country,” “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Trump further pledged to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and declared that “only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.” Trump’s call for “reverse migration” comes just over a month after the Department of Homeland Security posted “Remigrate” on X.
“Remigration” — interchangeable with “reverse migration” in fascist discourse — is a central demand of Great Replacement theorists, white nationalist movements in Europe and the United States, and racists advocating the forced removal of ethnic, religious, and immigrant populations deemed undesirable. Once the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, and especially after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, the Schutzstaffel (SS) began aggressively pressuring German Jews to emigrate.
Drawing directly from the same ideological architecture that animated ethnic purges in the 20th century and also underpins contemporary fascist movements, only hours before Trump announced that “only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow declared that the agency would begin intensified screening of migrants from 19 countries classified as “high-risk.”
The list includes Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
The directive took effect immediately, covering all pending and future immigration requests filed on or after November 27, and was issued without public legislative approval. Nearly every country named is either presently under US sanction or military occupation, or targeted in active war planning.
Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Iran, Sudan, and Yemen have all been bombed or invaded within the last decade. Marines and private contractors operate openly in Haiti. US military forces and Special Operations planners are advancing ground strike options against Venezuela.
Trump’s posts blame immigrants for every crisis produced by capitalism. He claims refugees are “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America,” linking them to “failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits.” He singled out Somali migrants, declaring they are “completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota,” and describing “Somalian gangs… roving the streets looking for ‘prey.’”
He directed bile at elected officials, calling Rep. Ilhan Omar “the worst ‘Congressman/woman,’” and labeled Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.” Such language expresses the degeneration of a ruling class devoid of humanity.
Trump and the billionaires he represents know that refugees and immigrants are not responsible for collapsing infrastructure, overcrowded hospitals, or homelessness. American capitalism is responsible. As David North, citing Oxfam, outlined in his recent London lecture, inequality in America has been skyrocketing for decades:
The wealthiest 0.1% own 12.6% of US assets.
From 1989 to 2022, the top percentile gained 101 times more wealth than the median household.
40% of the US population, including nearly half of all children, are poor or low-income.
The US is one of the richest societies in history, yet for the working class, life expectancy falls as COVID-19 runs rampant, tens of millions cannot afford housing or medical care, and workers labor longer for less. As millions struggle to survive, Trump’s cabinet and top appointees exceed $60 billion in net worth. Sixteen rank among the 813 billionaires in a nation of 341 million people.
Trump’s attacks on immigrants are aimed at obscuring this reality and dividing the working class from their brothers and sisters in the US and internationally. They serve not only as a spearhead for attacks on the democratic rights of the entire working class, but also serve to shield his and the Democrats’ responsibility for decades of imperialist war, which created the so-called “migrant crisis.” During America’s multi-decade “global war on terrorism,” over 37 million people have been forced to leave their homes due to imperialist violence.
Among those who were forced to migrate to the United States appears to have been the suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29. Lakanwal is currently facing multiple charges, including murder, after he shot Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, West Virginia and Andrew Wolfe, 24 on Wednesday. Beckstrom died on Thursday from her injuries while Wolf remains hospitalized and in critical condition as of this writing.
Lakanwal came to the United States in September 2021 after the US military withdrew from Afghanistan. Multiple reports have confirmed that he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011, while he was still a 15-year-old child, and participated in Zero Unit - paramilitary death squads run by the CIA during the 20-year occupation of the country. In 2018, Rolling Stone described Zero Units as the “CIA’s secret army,” trained by “American special-operations soldiers.”
While there is much information still to be uncovered, Lakanwal’s life illustrates what US intelligence has long-called “blowback” – the unintended consequences of US covert and overt military and political operations to advance the interests of US imperialism. During the US occupation, Lakanwal was trained to kill by the CIA. Then he was placed into civilian life in the country whose war created him. What the US did to Afghanistan returned to Washington.
Killing on behalf of the US government apparently took its toll on Lakanwal, as it has on thousands of US military veterans who returned from wars suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A childhood friend of Lakanwal, Muhammad, told the New York Times: “He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough… they were under a lot of pressure.”
Muhammad recalled Lakanwal telling him at his 2021 wedding that he had started smoking marijuana to deal with demons that haunted him. “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind,” Muhammad recalled.
One question stands unanswered: under conditions of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, what pressures and threats did Lakanwal face? The Trump administration apparently granted him asylum in April. If that was the case, why did he drive across the country to shoot two soldiers the day before a major national holiday? Did he maintain contact with his CIA handlers?
More broadly, if asylum recipients are told that citizenship may be revoked, that migrants who do not “love our Country” may be removed, and that “reverse migration” will be the policy, what degree of psychological stress will a person like Lakanwal, already traumatized, face?
There is no question that Trump is using Wednesday’s shooting to create conditions to invoke the Insurrection Act and rule as president-dictator. Following the shooting, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that 500 additional troops would be deployed to D.C. on the orders of Trump. A federal judge ruled the deployment illegal just last week, but this did not prevent Democratic D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser from agreeing to joint patrols between Guard units and the Metropolitan Police.
Leon Trotsky warned that capitalism in degeneration transforms the earth into “a foul prison.” Trump’s anti-immigrant pogrom and military occupations bring that prison to life. Stopping this trajectory will not occur through the Democrats, who are already collaborating with the aspiring dictator. It will come only through the united action of the working class—immigrant and native-born—against the ruling class that fears them both.