Still about race: white supremacy, immigration politics and Trumpism

In the first year of his second term in 2025, President Trump systematically reshaped the United States’ immigration system through a series of executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. This article argues that these EOs and their subsequent policies should not be simply understood as exceptional authoritarian tools in extraordinary political times in the United States. Instead, these seemingly disparate measures reflect historical continuity when examined within the broader context of the country’s violent and exclusionary racial politics and anti-immigrant past. As such, the article argues that President Trump’s EOs, proclamations and their corresponding policies are serving as routine technologies of racial statecraft – embedding Great Replacement (GRT) ideology within the administrative machinery of the US such that it is no longer a cultural conspiracy or fringe ideology. Through legitimising state practice and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions, these measures are serving as administrative rationality. Using a genealogical reading of policies derived from the current EOs on immigration, the article concludes with the implications for the future of multiracial citizenship and belonging in the United States.