During the end of November and beginning of December, two significant news stories involving crime and immigration got even more attention than they would have received under normal circumstances because of President Trump’s response to them.

On Nov. 26, an Afghan man shot two soldiers from the West Virginia National Guard who were deployed in Washington, D.C. One of the soldiers, Sarah Beckstrom, died of her wounds; the other, Andrew Wolfe, is still fighting for his life as of this writing and is listed in serious condition. The man who shot them had been admitted to the United States as a refugee in 2021 after serving alongside U.S. intelligence and military personnel during the war in Afghanistan.

In response to the shooting, Mr. Trump suspended all immigration requests from Afghanistan, and later expanded the pause in immigration processing to apply to the 19 “high-risk” countries to which a travel ban had been applied earlier in the year.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Mr. Trump announced that he was ending the Temporary Protected Status program, which shields immigrants from deportation to countries in crisis, for Somalis in Minnesota after reports of fraud cases in which members of that state’s Somali diaspora set up companies that billed the state millions of dollars for social services that were never provided. (The majority of those charged in the fraud cases are American citizens, either by birth or naturalization, and are not subject to deportation even if convicted.) 

During a cabinet meeting in early December, Mr. Trump said Somali immigrants should “go back to where they came from” and that the United States should not “keep taking in garbage into our country.” He also attacked Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American legislator who has been a frequent target of his in the past. At the same time, according to news reports, the Trump administration began planning an immigration enforcement surge targeting the Somali community in Minnesota.

In both these instances, real problems—a terrible act of violence targeting service members for representing the government and rampant abuse of resources meant to help people in need—have been leveraged as an excuse to scapegoat entire communities, depicting everyone of a certain nationality as a dangerous threat to American safety and prosperity and also tending to overshadow the real crimes that have been committed. Such scapegoating is perhaps the most consistent trope of Mr. Trump’s political rhetoric, dating back to the announcement of his first presidential campaign in 2015, when he described immigrants coming across the southern border as bringing drugs and crime and being rapists. 

His nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric has continued in much the same vein ever since, despite significant empirical research demonstrating that immigrants commit crime at lower rates than the U.S.-born population and do not increase crime rates in the communities where they settle. It would be a mistake, however, to think that Mr. Trump, in accusing immigrants of bringing crime into the United States, is attempting to make a factual claim that would be subject to confirmation or falsification. 

In his political rhetoric, almost all immigration from a more insecure or less prosperous country, even when immigrants are legally seeking asylum or coming as refugees, is part of a dangerous and underhanded attempt to exploit the United States. As can be seen in his administration’s mass deportation effort, simply being in the country as a noncitizen, or as a citizen sharing heritage with many undocumented immigrants, is cause enough for suspicion. Despite being a matter of civil law, irregular immigration status is itself being made the equivalent of criminality.

Even more than that, any crime committed by an immigrant is being treated as a more serious violation than similar crimes committed by citizens born in the United States. Under this political worldview, when someone who was not born in the United States commits an act of violence or fraud, something far worse than just the violence or fraud itself has happened: the proper order of things has been disrupted.

Illegal immigration is being treated as a sacrilege because it seems to violate something that has been made into an idol: the status and the security of being American. Behind the scapegoating and nativist rhetoric, there is a myth being reinforced of the United States as automatically safe and prosperous in itself, requiring only a defense against outsiders to maintain that idyllic state.

In a special message on immigration, which will be reprinted in our January issue, the U.S. bishops “pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence.” In order to cooperate in seeking that goal, we need to confront and overturn the idols we have set up. Or to put it another way, we need to be purified to recognize in all human beings the image and likeness of God, and to see Jesus in our brothers and sisters most in need.