Promoting a white nationalist agenda

From the moment he glided down an escalator to announce his presidential bid in June 2015, Trump ran a campaign that electrified white nationalists who saw in him a kindred spirit – a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.

Trump already had a long and well-documented history of racist comments and acts, including his real estate company’s discriminatory treatment of black people in the 1970s and his later characterization of them as lazy. He had catapulted himself onto the political scene, in fact, as a leader of the “birther” movement – a purveyor of the falsehood that Obama was not a U.S. citizen but rather a Kenyan by birth.

True to form, during his announcement speech, he described Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” The campaign that followed was the most xenophobic and racist by a major party nominee in modern U.S. history. He called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He claimed a U.S.-born Latino judge in one of his civil cases couldn’t be impartial because he was “Mexican.” He got into a verbal war with the Muslim-American parents of a fallen Army captain.

As president, Trump has done nothing to dispel the faith that white nationalists placed in him. Instead, he has reinforced it at virtually every turn.

While his predecessor took many actions to expand civil rights protections and the enforcement of those rights, Trump’s words and actions have invigorated a deeply racist, misogynistic movement that opposes equal rights for those who aren’t what they consider white.

From the earliest days of his administration, Trump installed a handful of key advisers who were closer to the radical right than to the mainstream. Stephen Bannon, who bragged about turning Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right” under his leadership, had Trump’s ear as chief strategist until his departure in late August.

Violence at the rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

Sebastian Gorka, a man who associated with neo-Nazis in his native Hungary, served as an adviser until late August. And Trump’s senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, was a one-time acolyte of anti-Muslim extremist David Horowitz and a close ally of anti-immigrant hate groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

When a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in deadly violence in August, it took two days for Trump to denounce the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. Then, during a contentious exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Aug. 15, Trump claimed there were “some very fine people” among the neo-Nazis marching with torches in Charlottesville.

Days later, Trump lamented the loss of “beautiful statues and monuments” that honor Confederate heroes such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose statue was the focus of the Charlottesville demonstration. Trump equated Confederate commanders with Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves.

The president’s remarks about Charlottesville were praised by former Klan chief David Duke, who attended the rally. “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” he tweeted. Earlier, Duke had spoken at the rally, proclaiming, “We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

Later that month, the racism at the core of Trump’s agenda was laid bare when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was awaiting a prison sentence for defying a court order that barred him from racially profiling Latinos. As a result of the Aug. 25 pardon, Arpaio, who rose to national prominence for his anti-immigrant tactics in Maricopa County, will never be held accountable for his years of unconstitutional conduct. Trump’s pardon sent an unmistakable message: The president of the United States had the backs of officials engaging in illegal, anti-immigrant crusades.

Despite the demands of the presidency, Trump also routinely found time to verbally attack and denigrate black athletes in 2017, even withdrawing a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors after the team’s superstar point guard, Stephen Curry, who is black, suggested he wouldn’t attend.

Trump railed against NFL players, approximately 70 percent of whom are black, for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans. During a rally in Alabama, he called on NFL team owners – an overwhelmingly white group – to take action against kneeling players.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, they say get that son of a bitch off the field right now – he’s fired! Fired!” Trump said. “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage.”

In January, during a meeting with members of Congress, he questioned why the country accepted immigrants from the supposedly “shithole countries” of Africa and said he preferred immigrants from countries like Norway.

Revving up the deportation machine

Trump, whose signature campaign promise was to “build a big, beautiful wall” at the Mexican border, was quick to enact executive orders on immigration, signing them during his first week in office. Since then, the administration’s supercharged deportation program has changed the lives of millions of people and eroded civil rights protections in numerous ways.

A surge in immigration arrests that began with the January executive orders has reversed the decline that began when Obama signed presidential directives on immigration in 2014, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

“These results clearly demonstrate profound, positive impact of the EO [executive order],” ICE said recently on its website.

It was indeed a profound impact, but not so positive.

A detainee at an immigrant detention center

As president, Trump has continued to inveigh against Latino immigrants, conjuring images of out-of-control street gangs terrorizing U.S. communities. In July, the president warned of Latino gangs that target “young, beautiful” girls and “slice them and dice them with a knife.” He lauded the federal government for “throwing MS-13 the hell out of here so fast.” But, in reality, ICE did little of that. There are very few migrants in U.S. jails and prisons linked to criminal street gangs.

Agents instead sought and detained hundreds of thousands of nonviolent, noncriminal immigrants. They weren’t the “bad hombres” Trump pledged to eject during the campaign. During the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, ICE recorded a 150 percent increase in the arrests of immigrants who had not been convicted of crimes unrelated to their legal status.

Across the country, federal agents reportedly violated both due process rights and basic decency with the new “anything goes” enforcement style. Meanwhile, some detainees’ partners and children – many of whom are U.S. citizens – were left with depleted incomes and little recourse but to leave the country or live in poverty.

Trump then ended Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy in September. More than 700,000 young people, who were brought to the United States as children, were told they may be deported.

Trump wasn’t finished. Two months later, the administration moved to end a special status for hundreds of thousands of people from Central American and Caribbean countries who came to the United States to seek refuge from danger in their countries. The New York Times revealed that Trump complained to his aides in June about foreigners allowed to come to this country, saying refugees from Haiti “all have AIDS.”

Now, the latest data reveal the effect of a tumultuous year in immigration policy. The rate of asylum denials is rising, while legal representation for asylees is falling.

The Department of Homeland Security moved to deport 243,916 people in FY 2017. And backlogs in the immigration courts are growing, which could mean longer detentions and worse conditions in already remote and shadowy DHS facilities, especially for children, who often lack the resources to get representation.

As Trump prepared to enter his second year in office, the administration doubled down on its anti-immigrant crusade. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced that she was asking the DOJ whether it could seek criminal charges against local officials in “sanctuary cities,” where police departments do not assist federal deportation efforts.

Trump’s actions have sparked a broad backlash by civil rights advocates across the country. The SPLC, for example, launched the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, a project that aims to safeguard due process by providing pro bono legal representation to immigrants held in detention facilities in the Southeast.

Attacking voting rights

After Trump’s shocking 2016 electoral victory, he took to Twitter to claim that “millions of people” had voted illegally, costing him the popular vote. He repeated the lie during a meeting with lawmakers in January, leading NBC News to rank it as one of Trump’s “biggest whoppers of 2017.”

The claims were just the latest instance of Trump perpetuating lies about “rigged” elections and vast voter-fraud conspiracies. Years earlier, for example, he used Twitter to claim that “polls have shown that DEAD PEOPLE voted for President Obama overwhelmingly.”

Numerous studies have shown that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in the United States. Researchers at the Brennan Center have found that it is rarer than death by lightning. And Trump’s own lawyers contended that “the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake” in a court filing opposing a third party candidate’s recount effort in Michigan.

Kris Kobach

Despite these findings, Trump used the power of the executive branch to launch an ill-fated investigation into voter fraud – an effort that the SPLC and other civil rights groups saw as a vehicle to promote voter ID laws and other restrictions that suppress the votes of minorities and the poor.

In May, Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, naming Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as its vice chair and de facto chief. Kobach is a longtime lawyer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform – an anti-immigrant hate group with ties to white nationalists. He is a leader in the movement to suppress the votes of minorities and has a track record of aggressively prosecuting voter fraud where none exists.

As Kansas secretary of state, Kobach began removing people from his state’s voter rolls in 2015, making anyone who did not provide proof of citizenship within 90 days ineligible to vote. “It’s no big deal,” he once said, according to The New York Times Magazine. “Nobody’s being disenfranchised.”

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a fellow at the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council, was also named to the commission. A 2005 report found that Blackwell was at fault for “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio” during the 2004 election.

As the commission’s vice chairman, Kobach asked states to turn over voter information, including names, addresses, birth dates, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, political affiliation, voting histories and felony convictions. Twenty states refused to provide the data, as others requested time to determine if they could provide it. In December, a U.S. appeals court rejected a watchdog group’s legal challenge to the data request.

In early 2018, the administration dissolved the commission, citing the refusal of several states to produce voter information and the prospect of costly legal battles. In a tweet, Trump placed the blame on “mostly Democrat States” that “refused to hand over data.”

“They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally,” he tweeted. “System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.”

Encouraging police abuses

Though much of the United States is safer now than it has been in decades, Trump continued to create his own, alternate reality in 2017. In his inauguration address, the president spoke of the need to curb the “American carnage” brought on, in part, by crime.

Later that month, he appointed U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to carry out that mission. The implications for policing and criminal justice in America have been huge.

Sessions hinted early on that consent decrees with police departments with histories of racial discrimination and police abuse would soon be up for review. He offered a change of course for the Justice Department at his Senate confirmation hearing. “I think there is concern that good police officers can be sued when you just have individuals within a department that have done wrong,” he said. “These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers.”

Sure enough, in March, Sessions ordered a review of consent decrees that resulted from Obama administration investigations into police brutality and other law enforcement abuses in major U.S. cities.

Police departments in Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland and others – places with records of severe rights violations – were given the opportunity to dodge accountability for the killings of black men by officers and deeply ingrained, institutional racism. The Justice Department’s own investigations had revealed their culpability and demanded reforms. Now, Sessions offered them some relief.

The attorney general didn’t stop with that. Despite bipartisan opposition, he revived a federal civil asset forfeiture program that is widely viewed as abusive, despite evidence that it does little to curtail crime. Local police departments will likely jump at the chance to resume taking advantage of the program, called Equitable Sharing, that incentivizes law enforcement to put money – often seized from people never even charged with a crime – over public safety. Sessions also continued his bizarre crusade against states that have legalized marijuana.

Trump, for his part, outright endorsed police violence – just as he had encouraged violence against hecklers at his campaign rallies. Before a crowd of police officers in Brentwood, New York, in July he mused about the moment a suspect is led into the back seat of a police car. An officer in that situation might protect the person’s head as they sit down. “I said, you can take the hand away, OK?” Trump said. The officers in attendance laughed.

Undermining public education

As early as 2015, Donald Trump took aim at the civil rights of schoolchildren by calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).

“Department of Education should be disbanded not expanded. Focus on local education,” he tweeted.

As president, Trump began making good on the threat, targeting an agency that has helped, among others, children in low-income schools, kids with disabilities and other young people historically underserved by their local schools.

Trump’s education secretary, billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos, has overseen an effort to shrink the agency, proposing to slash $9.2 billion from its budget, which would eliminate college-prep programs for poor children. By November 2017, the agency had shed nearly 8 percent of its staff, or roughly 350 employees. DeVos also has proposed cutting staff from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which addresses discrimination complaints that are at record highs. The acting assistant secretary for civil rights directed her staff to pursue only individual complaints, rather than systemic relief that could help hundreds or thousands of students, in direct contravention of how the Obama administration had used its enforcement authority.

The administration’s proposed 2018 budget allocated $250 million for a nationwide school voucher program that would divert millions of taxpayer dollars to private schools, undercutting public schools and the right to an equal and accessible education for all. The proposal was made despite of years of research showing that private school vouchers are neither an effective nor equitable way of improving the nation’s schools.

During a congressional hearing in May, DeVos refused to say if federal funds would be denied to private schools that discriminate against admitting students based on their sexual orientation, race or disabilities.

“I am shocked that you cannot come up with one example of discrimination that you would stand up for students,” Rep. Katherine Clark said at the hearing.

DeVos also rescinded Obama-era DOE guidance documents that protected students with disabilities from discrimination. In February, for example, she withdrew the department’s policy of directing schools not to discriminate against students on the basis of their transgender status. In September, she scrapped rules outlining how schools should investigate sexual misconduct, claiming, among other things, that they did not sufficiently take into account the rights of the accused. As part of the justification for doing so, the acting assistant secretary said that “90 percent” of sexual assault accusations come from women who were drunk when the incident happened and filed a complaint later as revenge for a bad breakup.

DeVos also has proposed eliminating department priorities related to school diversity, community engagement and access to technology – priorities that help ensure schools are inclusive, welcoming and diverse environments that benefit all children.

In the wake of policies and practices that threaten to deny students the opportunity for a good education, it seems clear that Trump wasn’t joking when he famously proclaimed on the campaign trail, “I love the poorly educated.”