Jason Stanley: Ethnic Cleansing Is Coming to America

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, controversy continues to swell around President Trump’s immigration agenda as he pushes through a series of sweeping changes from recent Supreme Court rulings terminating protected status for Haitians and Syrians to fast-tracking refugee status for white South Africans. Outrage has spread across the country.

 

Now, this comes less than six months after two Americans were shot and killed in separate incidents involving federal immigration officers in Minnesota. Author and chair of American Studies at the University of Toronto, Jason Stanley, now joins Michel Martin to discuss this.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Jason Stanley. Thank you so much for talking with us once again.

 

JASON STANLEY:Thank you for having me on. Michel.

 

MARTIN: We often consult with you because of your expertise in the subjects of authoritarianism, propaganda, how governments define who belongs. In the United States, the Supreme Court term just ended, and there were some very consequential decisions around immigration and also citizenship. So on the one hand, the court — by a narrower than expected majority — did uphold the concept of birthright citizenship. This was a priority of president Donald Trump’s in his second term. He signed an executive order on his, the first day of his second term in office, saying that he wanted to change that birthright citizenship should be illegal. The court said, you know, he couldn’t. But nevertheless, just the sort of the discourse around it surprised a lot of people. They thought, this has settled off. This has been settled for 150 years.

 

So, I’m curious about your thoughts about that, about how the Court ruled as it did, and why there was even a discussion to begin with.

 

STANLEY: Well, the court has to maintain some measure of legitimacy because they’re so obviously a tool for authoritarian purposes. For example, they ruled to allow essentially unlimited cash donations into politics as well, extending the Citizens United decision. So they really couldn’t have taken a ruling that was so obviously inimical to the Constitution as Trump was here asking them to do. 

 

And as you said, Stephen Miller and other administration officials have gone on the media and really excoriated the court in really the most extreme racist terms imaginable. Miller said that you know, we’re gonna have people from countries that wouldn’t have even invented the wheel — and they’re, and having babies in our hospitals. And these are kids who are gonna grow up to serve on juries and judge you and your loved ones. In other words, he’s saying that essentially non-white immigrants to the United States, because of their skin color, really, are permanently inferior, permanently evil, permanently problematic, and should be permanently disbarred. 

 

So, you know, you would think that someone growing up in the United States, even if they came from a difficult background, would, you know, if they’re like any other human being be part of the culture and the education system. But that’s what’s being denied here. And that’s why what we see — contra the Court’s decision in its removal of TPS designation — we see that this administration is promoting racism as essentially its major ideology.

 

MARTIN: TPS refers to temporary protected status. That was another consequential decision of the Court. It clears the way for the Trump administration to revoke temporary protected status, in this case, the case before the Court was specifically two groups, Haitians and Syrians, who had contested the administration’s decision to do this. And other groups are implicated by this. There are other groups that are currently living in the United States under temporary protected status. 

 

This is a status that is conveyed to people whose countries of origin are considered too dangerous or too unstable to return to. And, you know, this was originally extended to people of Haitian descent after the earthquake, which was, you know, this devastating earthquake some years ago. But at the same time, the administration is moving to end protections for Haitians, it’s created this expedited pathway for white Afrikaners from South Africa. And so when you look at those two things together, what do you see? 

 

STANLEY: Well, it’s, it’s essentially the core of Nazi ideology, which is white replacement theory. The, if you listen to Tucker Carlson, he says things like, Well, we don’t want people coming over and replacing Americans, but it’s fine for white South Africans to come over and replace Americans. And who are the white South Africans coming over? They’re people who are claiming that they’ve been oppressed because they’re white. So we are importing people who are saying that they are targeted and victims because they’re white. Those are the kinds of people we want to bring in to vote and have and serve on juries. And then we are expelling those already in the country who are from Haiti, from Somalia, from Venezuela. 

 

And then the reason given for the lifting, for the lifting of TPS status in November, 2025, was that it was in the national interest to remove Haitians from the United States. Why is it in the national interest? Because bringing in Haitians brings in criminal gangs. So that there is the Nazi propaganda: the linking of targeted racial groups to crime. So the idea — and of course, Haitian immigrants do, are not in any sense, connected, more connected or even as is connected to crime as other groups. We’re talking about a group that has 14,000 of them are nursing assistants. 8,000 of them are caregivers. So, you know, we’ve got a large group of vital people contributing billions and billions of dollars to the economy. But it’s supposed to be in our national interest to remove them, because somehow they’re sort of destined genetically to not thrive here. And then of course, there’s the Nazi propaganda that JD Vance engaged in, which is that they’re eating cats and dogs. In other words, they’re savages. 

 

MARTIN: Just to clarify for people who don’t necessarily know what you’re talking about. During the campaign, during the presidential debate, President Trump made this assertion that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets. And I have to tell you, having reported this thoroughly, it is false. It is false. So I just feel I have to say this, but, but having said that one of the arguments that the people, the advocates for the Haitians made in arguing against revoking their temporary protected status was that this was racist. And the administration denies that it’s racist. 

 

There was a post on X, formerly Twitter, last September, where the Department wrote “Allegations that DHS law enforcement officers engage in racial profiling are disgusting, reckless, and categorically false. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the us not their skin color, race, or ethnicity.” 

 

STANLEY: How is that consistent with the statements that President Trump made or Stephen Miller has made, or Greg Bovino’s attendance at a remigration conference in Portugal with a known neo-Nazi who advocates the return of, most non-whites in Europe to, to their supposed home countries. I mean, you know, we have time and we’re told time and time again that certain non-white groups that Haitians, that Somalians are, are sort of essentially devoid of moral principles and could not acquire them. That is the very definition of racism.

 

MARTIN: Let’s just say for the sake of argument, that somebody’s listening to our conversation and says, You know what? That’s a shame. That’s a shame. But, you know, temporary protected status is supposed to mean temporary. The fact is, they should either find other pathways to regularize their status, or they should go home. It was never meant to be this long. It just, a shame, but what does it have to do with me? What would you say to people who felt that way?

 

STANLEY: Well, Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance spoke about this recently. She spoke about the trauma that these people are feeling, the extreme nature of what’s about to occur. We witnessed what happened in Minneapolis. The citizens of Minneapolis, regardless of their ethnicity, background whatever were traumatized. And that trauma of having an invasion of your home city will last for decades. I mean, that was a, a brutal thing for the world to see that destroyed America’s reputation. I mean, I am obviously living in Canada. I am, I work all over the world. Those pictures of what happened in Minneapolis were incredibly impactful, negatively, on America’s reputation. 

 

And then just as a human rights matter, think about children growing up in this country, whose parents are hiding in basements unable to, to go out. 

 

Now I’ve, I’ve heard Christopher Rufo had an interview recently with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein. He said, oh, well, we, they did it incorrectly. They shouldn’t have used military force. They shouldn’t have, you know, basically invaded an American city. We should do it differently to encourage ’em to self deport. We should close them from the banking system. We should, you know, close ’em from schools and hospitals.

 

I first heard the concept of encouraging people to self deport in the context of Nazi Germany. That was the explicit goal. They wanted to treat people brutally to encourage them to self deport. So what we’re about to witness is a massive ethnic cleansing. This massive ethnic cleansing will be on a historical scale. It’ll be like the Rohingya in Myanmar, another case of ethnic cleansing. This is going to be ethnic cleansing that will be a stain on the soul of America for as long as this nation exists. 

 

MARTIN: You’ve used the word Nazi several times in our conversation, and there are people who, of different perspectives, who take issue with the word. They think it has a specific historical meaning, and it should only be applied to that meaning. And there are others who just think it’s extreme in the American context. What do you say to that?

 

STANLEY: Yeah. Well, Hitler in Mein Kampf describes the United States as the country he most wants to emulate Germany to. It’s a, he describes it as a racial state. And we know that Hitler read Madison Grant’s book “The Passing of the Great Race” when he was in prison and admired it, about how the Nordic race, you know, the Nordic whites are threatening to are going to be, are being replaced by immigrants. And we need to prevent this or else, you know, we will destroy the great race. And this is the ideology we’re returning to. And the fact is, this ideology deeply affected Hitler and helped shape the Nazi ideology. 

 

So I’m not saying we face mass antisemitism on the American right. We do not face any kind of genocide of Jewish people. But what we face is, you know, white replacement theory — this enormous racism that’s based in the United States. We have to see the roots of Nazi ideology in the United States and the extermination of indigenous people and the white racial hierarchy of the United States. So it’s when they tell us they want to make America great again, what they mean is they want to return us to the time of the Asian Exclusion Act. The 1924 Immigration Act that closed our borders, to Jim Crow as it did to Supreme Court, has just returned us to Jim Crow in terms of voting rights of Black Americans in the South. And, you know, these are the things that affected Nazi law. The very laws that removed the citizenship of my father and my German side of my family were based on the Jim Crow laws. So, you know, this is not an either or here. It’s, you know, we are, the era they’re returning us to is the era of American fascism.

 

MARTIN: Some people may argue that these policies are tough, even distasteful, but they’re the result of voters demanding stronger immigration enforcement after years of record border crossing. And so they’re, they would argue that this is, and in fact, I think the administration argues this, that this is not authoritarianism, it’s actually democratic policy making, and that this is the result – that these actions are the result – of what the voters have expressed their desire to be. What would you say to that?

 

STANLEY: Well, liberal democracy is not just the tyranny of the majority. If the majority of people say, Okay, we want to kill all the Jews, you can’t kill all the Jews. That’s not, you can’t say, Oh, it’s democracy. The majority of people want that. Liberal democracy as a commitment to the foundational ideals of my country, the United States, which is that all humans are created equal, all men are created equal. You can’t violate a fundamental principles of human rights and a liberal democracy, even if the majority want it. And this would be a mass ethnic cleansing, why is it that they stopped the ICE invasion of Minneapolis? Well, it’s the heroic actions of the people in Minneapolis, of course. But what the people of Minneapolis did is they showed how horrific what was happening was, and it became extremely democratically unpopular. Now, I think what their hope is, is to do it all behind the scenes.

You know, the brutality will be – you know, this happened to my family in Berlin. They were hidden, they were increasingly walled off from the rest of society. They didn’t allow Jews to be on the stage. So you could only have, my grandmother went around and did theater just for other Jewish people. They wall you walled them off from society, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re taking that playbook, and they’re hoping that people won’t see it. Well, if it was democratically popular, they shouldn’t need to do it behind the scenes.

 

MARTIN: You have always expressed yourself in these very stark terms, especially in relation to these issues. You express yourself in terms that a lot of people find extreme. I mean, you know, this, people say that, you know, you’re hysterical or that you are being extremist.

 

So when you say that, that this needs to be thought of in sort of a larger historical context, that we’ve seen these kind, this kind of behaviors before. Do you see that people are seeing the sort of the historical threads that you have been trying to sort of draw for them over the course of really the past couple of years?

 

STANLEY: Yes. I mean, I think every time I say that something will happen and people mock me for saying it, it then becomes, you know, something that everyone says, everyone knows the midterms are under threat. Everyone knows they’re trying to steal the midterms. That’s not a radical or extreme thing to say right now. What they did in Minneapolis was radical and extreme. You know, they invaded a US city with essentially like a, an as a militarized police force, you know, directed inside against the country. 

 

And I think across what Americans need to realize is the whole world is coming to think in very extreme terms about the United States. And I’m an American. I don’t want my country to go through — we already have this horrific legacy. This draws on that horrific legacy. This moment in America draws on our horrific legacy of anti-Black racism, you know, of mass incarceration. We’re building these ever larger warehouses to store these people in — to store immigrants in. And I just don’t want to see my country further permanently scarred by these crimes against humanity, which I fear we are just about to perpetrate.

 

MARTIN: Professor Jason Stanley, thank you for talking with us once again.

 

STANLEY: Thank you.