In January I watched Nasra Ahmed, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. citizen of Somali heritage, testify about her experience at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis a few weeks prior, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then under the command of Kristi Noem, ordered a massive raid on the city. Wearing a hijab that partly covered the fresh bandages on her forehead, Ahmed recounted how agents called her the N-word, pinned her to the floor with such force she got a concussion, and shackled her hands and ankles before whisking her off to a detention center, where she would be held for two days without charge. She was only one of many Somali Minnesotans who were terrorized during the raid; even as community organizers led mobilizations to protect their neighborhoods, a host of Somalis reported being afraid to leave their homes, and Black women and girls in hijab described being chased down the streets by border agents.

The siege of Minneapolis, DHS’s largest immigration operation to date, was justified through a crackdown on fraud supposedly linked to Somalis, whom Trump had described as “bandits” and “pirates”—a characterization that reveals much of the new ICE regime’s ideology. Certainly, in his first term, Trump singled out Black immigrants, claiming that Haitians and Africans came from “shithole countries” and passing a series of travel restrictions that targeted African countries so disproportionately that critics dubbed it the “Muslim and African Ban.” But in his second term the administration has doubled down on its rhetoric, turning Africans into the paradigmatic examples of what they deem a civilization-level “crisis” facing Western society. Today, an expanded “Muslim and African Ban” subjects citizens of twenty-six African countries to full or partial visa restrictions on travel to the United States. Meanwhile, Trump is waging a campaign against Black immigrants living within U.S. borders. Bearing the brunt are Haitians and Somalis, denigrated as “low IQ” and “garbage,” a drain on and a threat to the American way of life.

While African so-called criminals have become ICE and DHS’s most visible targets, the agencies have stretched their dragnet across racial and national lines. Under the second Trump administration, immigrants of all backgrounds and legal statuses face unique forms of terror: not just deportations, but growing prohibitions on visas and refugee status, threats of denaturalization, the end of Temporary Protected Status and birthright citizenship, and the removal of detainees to “third countries,” most of which are in Africa. These moves are taking place against the backdrop of a growing chorus of white nationalist calls for “remigration”—the deportation of nonwhite migrants regardless of citizenship—and mass ethnic cleansing, demands that are rapidly becoming normalized in policy across North America and Europe.