DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
International students, asylum-seekers, immigrants showing up to court. Under President Trump, more and more kinds of people are being targeted for removal from the United States. At the same time, the administration is limiting who is allowed in, as with a recent travel ban for 12 countries. NPR's Sandhya Dirks reports on how Trump's policies are telegraphing a massive shift in who is welcome in America.
SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE: Lok Darjee (ph) is 29 now, but when he came to the U.S. in 2011, he was a teenage refugee fleeing forced expulsion from Bhutan. His family arrived in small-town Idaho and began a new life.
LOK DARJEE: What I thought was being American was, you know, you come here. You work hard. You get a job. You follow the constitutions, and it doesn't matter what you look like.
DIRKS: He embraced the American dream, even becoming - like so many of his Twin Falls, Idaho, neighbors - a Mormon. And he made his way to an Ivy League school. Now he says he feels like the Trump administration is redrawing the image of what a good immigrant looks like, and he feels like he no longer fits.
DARJEE: It feels like I'm doing wrong. You know, I'm not American enough, right?
DIRKS: So who does fit in now? We reached out to the White House to ask who they want to come, to visit, to study, to stay. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson emailed, quote, "President Trump's top priority is the safety and prosperity of the American people. He has always encouraged legal immigration by individuals who love America and want to come here the right way."
The fact remains that the government has indefinitely paused all refugee admissions, even for those who followed the rules and completed yearslong background checks. One group Trump has embraced with special expedited refugee status - white South Africans.
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CHRISTOPHER LANDAU: Welcome to the United States of America.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Thank you, sir.
DIRKS: That's Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, one of two high-level Trump cabinet members greeting the 59 Afrikaners at Dulles International Airport in Virginia in early May.
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LANDAU: We respect the long tradition of your people.
DIRKS: It's unusual for such high-ranking officials to meet refugees, and it's worth paying attention to the language Landau uses to welcome the group.
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LANDAU: When you have quality seeds, you can put them in foreign soil, and they will blossom. They will bloom.
DIRKS: Stephen Miller - the architect of Trump's immigration plans - told journalists the Afrikaners' upcoming arrival was a really exciting news story.
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STEPHEN MILLER: What's happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created. This is persecution based on a protected characteristic - in this case, race.
DIRKS: The South African government says these claims of persecution are false, but that hasn't stopped Trump from pushing a debunked conspiracy theory that white farmers have experienced genocide at the hands of Black South Africans - a theory that comes from far-right corners of the internet. That kind of white identity politics is often present in Trump's rhetoric, like in 2023, at a New Hampshire rally.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done.
DIRKS: Or on the Hugh Hewitt podcast that same year.
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TRUMP: We got bad - a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
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TRUMP: You have good genes. You know that, right?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Laughter).
DIRKS: Or in 2020...
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TRUMP: You have good genes.
DIRKS: ...At a rally in Minnesota.
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TRUMP: A lot of it's about the genes, isn't it? Don't you believe?
SHANNON BOW O'BRIEN: He went up, I believe, to Minnesota and told people, I believe in racehorse theory, and you guys are the ones with the good genes up here. That's eugenics 101.
DIRKS: The history of eugenics and American politics is something Shannon Bow O'Brien studies as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
O'BRIEN: At the end of the day, a lot of this comes down to immigration. The stuff from the history is still here.
DIRKS: The stuff from the history. One example she gives, when the U.S. passed the 1924 Immigration Act, which excluded almost anyone who wasn't a white Northern European. That changed in 1965, when new laws opened America up. Now O'Brien says the ideas from a century ago have crept back in.
O'BRIEN: Now we're talking about self-deportation, and we're talking about trying to remove people - usually of color - from America.
DIRKS: Removing people worries Wendy Via of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She's especially concerned about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's proposal to restructure the State Department by July 1. NPR has obtained a copy of the letter the State Department sent to Congress about the plan changes, which includes the creation of an Office of Remigration. That office would shift focus from welcoming refugees to removing people from the United States.
WENDY VIA: The gloves are entirely off.
DIRKS: Via says the use of the word remigration is a red flag. She says remigration is a policy idea that was popularized by an Austrian former neo-Nazi named Martin Sellner, who started using the term in 2019. She says it's been embraced by far-right European politicians as a plan to remove nonwhite migrants and Muslims.
VIA: What it really is is a deeply racist plan to keep white people separate from nonwhite people and to make sure that so-called Western civilization remains strong.
DIRKS: NPR asked both the White House and the State Department for comment about plans for an Office of Remigration. None was given. In America, Via says welcoming Afrikaners - white South Africans - and removing many nonwhite people sends a clear message. She says Trump is signaling just who he thinks an American should be.
Sandhya Dirks, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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