Let’s Call Mass Deportation What It Is: Ethnic Cleansing

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and mass deportation strategies are not an immigration issue; that’s just a smokescreen for what’s really happening, which is “Ethnic Cleansing”.

A literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian phrase etnicko ciscenje, ethnic cleansing, was widely deployed in the 1990s in Yugoslavia. The targets included Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs in Croatia, and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. It was perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces under war criminal President Slobodan Milošević.

Initially, the main focus of our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) sweeps for “illegals” seemed to be on brown skinned folks who happen to be Latinos and/or Muslims. Now, in a fervor of white nationalism, that focus appears to be expanding to other ethnic groups, basically putting anyone who isn’t descended from those racially acceptable white Northern European folks under scrutiny.

Media coverage show events where agents roll up and suddenly materialize to grab “suspected immigrants” from various locations (oddly enough, a great number of these “actions” seem to be focused in blue states like California), stuffing their victims into unmarked vehicles and hauling them off to squalid detention areas and worse, probable deportations to remote locations which might not even be in our hemisphere. This institutionalized kidnapping puts a chill down my spine, as it wasn’t too many years ago that, while visiting China, I witnessed government thugs in unmarked vans sweep in to grab protesters. It definitely left an impression, and I remember thinking how grateful I was that it would never happen here in our country. I thought wrong.

What’s the common denominator of these ICE targets? They usually have a somewhat different skin color or ethnicity from “acceptable” people in a specific area, and that makes them a target. I lived in northern Arizona for nearly six months in a community that reveled in being primarily white and saw that they could be pretty nasty to anyone wanting to change that situation… It was an eye-opener.

Under the current administration, being a person who isn’t sporting a lily-white complexion instantly makes you a suspect, guilty of border incursions or anything else until proven different. Remember that statement, “they’re sending their rapists and drug dealers”? Proving your innocence can be expensive, time-consuming and sometimes impossible if you’re locked up in some hell-hole. These days, if you happen to be “less than white”, it’s starting to look like you should always be carrying your birth certificate or passport to not get carted away.

SS Reichsführer Miller

How could this be? Who would have the audacity and willfulness to set up a system like this?

Let’s step back and take a longer look at what’s going on here. Pardon my bluntness, but I’m going with that common perception that Donald Trump is an ignorant racist and a fascist. But I recognize that he’s got talent!  A veteran of reality shows, he has proven himself a good performer who can read a teleprompter, deliver his lines well and has incorporated his personality “quirks” into his messaging and delivery.  Donald’s performer brain instinctively knows the value of stupidity and ignorance in his audience and has stated (correctly) that “Smart people don’t like me”. His twisted talent and instinct let him infuse his rants with genuine passion, allowing him to connect to the ignorant, racist and fascist crowd easily.

But passion and oratory skills aren’t enough to construct such a complex (and fairly successful) government mechanism to disappear so many people… And Donald isn’t really smart enough to cobble together a working system to implement his rants. So who is it?

It’s guys like Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who now sit at his side like malevolent gargoyles, guiding his policy decisions. Another factor is that Donald appears to now be in rapid cognitive decline (international media are now calling him “deranged” and “the world’s most powerful man-baby”), which leaves people like Miller doing more and more of the actual dirty work after sending Donnie out to play golf. They then pull him back in to perform, signing things with his big Sharpie pen and to entertain his enraptured base with disjointed (but passionate) speeches.

But who is Stephen Miller? He is Trump’s main policy advisor and has been labeled one of the main architects of Trump’s agenda. He is notoriously anti-immigrant and is, by most accounts, a thinly veiled white supremacist. He also appears to favor a class system where privilege is afforded to those with the most favorable economic circumstances. Darker folks can be tolerated in the system, but only if they stay in subservient positions in the social structure and do what they are told (Clarence Thomas comes to mind).

When Miller first appeared on the political scene, a video surfaced from his high school years, when he first became interested in local leadership and stated that he was “sick and tired of being told to pick up his trash when there were janitors to do that.“

That certainly says a lot about his early character foundation.

As Miller delved deeper into politics, he became so dangerous that his own uncle spoke out against him for the sake of his family. Here’s an excerpt from the Nov 2024 Atlanta Black Star titled “His Own Family Disowned Him’: Donald Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Pick, Stephen Miller, Called a ‘Despicable Human Being.”

Miller made headlines in 2019 after it was discovered that he was sending white nationalist literature and propaganda to news editors at the hard-right news organization Breitbart. A former Breitbart writer leaked more than 900 emails to the Southern Poverty Law Center, revealing that several of Miller’s immigration policy proposals were modeled after extremist source materials.

“Anti-White Racism”

After Trump was ousted from office in 2020, Miller founded and led the America First Legal conservative organization, which served as the bedrock for a sweeping push back against the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts (DEI), filing numerous discrimination lawsuits alleging that “anti-white racism” was rampant in corporations, colleges and universities. America First Legal was behind the litigation that led to the landmark 6-3 Supreme Court decision last summer declaring race-based affirmative action college admissions policies unconstitutional.

Miller’s racism has fermented into an incredible hatred of anything that even has a whiff of the DEI agenda. This makes sense as most racists see DEI as an attack on their tenuous hold of white-male supremacy and privilege in this country. I don’t think it’s an accident that the current administration is spending an enormous amount of time and energy trying to uproot any DEI efforts from American society and restore what they see as the “proper” way things should be. Remember the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville chanting, “You will not replace us” during the first Trump presidency?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a significant number of Federal agency leaders and military commanders who have supported DEI are being removed and seem to be especially vulnerable to termination if they happen to be of a darker complexion or female. Usually, the administration says some nonsense about how they were “not fully supportive of the current agendas.” Which is code for they don’t support the idea of white male leadership being an exclusive club.

Military leadership is especially important, and the idea that high-ranking positions are now potentially “color-coded” is particularly alarming. I’m a veteran from the 1970s, when the military was making its best effort to fully integrate and appeared to be doing a commendable job, so I view this as a dangerous reversal. Leadership should always be based on merit and talent, not on political loyalty or racial profiling. As my old sergeant said, “The only color that should be important to you is the color of the uniform of the guy next to you.”

The war on Latino immigrants

For the current situation, here’s a quote from the July 2025 New Republic: “Transcript: Stephen Miller Rages at Low Arrests—and Wrecks a MAGA Scam.”

“Stephen Miller has been privately raging at ICE officials, demanding that they send their agents out to arrest as many day laborers and construction workers as possible—all to get those deportation numbers way, way up.”

It’s less than an amazing coincidence that day laborers and construction workers just happen to have a sizable percentage of Latinos. And these working guys are hardly the dangerous drug-dealing gang members we were warned about.

There are, by some accounts, at least half a million white European illegals in the US as well, according to the Migration Policy Institute. But we’re not seeing ICE raids on them and being carted off. And the number of “illegal” Asians working here is also fairly high, with estimates of over a million and a half. Many are working in high-tech positions for Donald’s friends (and making them a lot of money, which probably buys them some safety). Many are sporting a lighter, less offensive brown-skinned tone, so up until recently, they were not as high a priority on the target list.

Unfortunately, that recently changed when ICE raided the huge Hyundai facility under construction in Georgia and “detained” around 475 people, the majority of whom were skilled Korean nationals here as technicians and trainers. To the Koreans (who culturally put a lot of value in maintaining “face”), this is a huge insult and has the potential to be a real deal-breaker for Georgia’s plans to bring in outside investment.

This incident reminds me that during my working years, I was often sent to different countries as a skilled “advisor” with a wink and a nod to the Visa rules, allowing me to work on behalf of American companies. I can pretty much guarantee that if I had been arrested, shackled and then tossed into a detention camp, I’d NEVER go back.

Miller’s enthusiastic racism has been the force behind building a political mechanism to implement the Trump administration’s efforts to reinstate white supremacy by way of eliminating non-white people and uppity women who don’t know their place. Plain and simple, this is ethnic cleansing with misogyny thrown in for seasoning. I could go on and on, but let’s be real, this is not an “illegal immigrant” issue at all, but just a cover for chasing down anyone who isn’t white enough to fit their strict definition of acceptable people.

As the old saying goes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”