Trump is waging a silent war on legal immigration

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Policy PolicyPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Policy Report ReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Report Politics PoliticsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

FollowSee All PoliticsTrump is waging a silent war on legal immigrationICE raids are the most visible attack on undocumented communities, but Trump has quietly wielded bureaucracy on legal immigrants, too. ICE raids are the most visible attack on undocumented communities, but Trump has quietly wielded bureaucracy on legal immigrants, too. by Gaby Del Valle Gaby Del VallePolicy ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

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FollowSee All by Gaby Del ValleMay 20, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge, Getty Images Gaby Del Valle Gaby Del VallePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Gaby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge covering surveillance, the Department of Homeland Security, and the tech-right. When the member states of the United Nations reviewed their Global Compact on Migration earlier this month, one country was conspicuously absent from the discussions: the United States.

In a post on X explaining its reasoning, the State Department said it objects to global “efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies. ” A subsequent post clarified that President Donald Trump’s administration supports “remigration — but not replacement migration. ”If “replacement migration” sounds like a dogwhistle, that’s because it’s one the administration’s loudest ones yet.

Such allusions to the “great replacement” — a far-right conspiracy theory that a cabal of global elites is importing people of color to the US as a means of demographic warfare — and support of remigration, the notion that immigrants and their descendants should be returned to their countries of origin regardless of citizenship voluntarily or otherwise, were once limited to the fringes of the far right. Now they are coming from the government itself. (Elon Musk, a longtime proponent of the great replacement theory, applauded the State Department’s “banger thread.

”) Eliminating “replacement migration” and pushing “remigration” are hallmarks of Trump’s second-term immigration policy, which has focused on deporting as many people as possible while preventing new immigrants from arriving here. It’d be easier to ignore if it was just a post on X. But since returning to office, Trump has drastically slashed legal immigration and has worked to strip immigrants of their legal status in pursuit of his mass deportation policy.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.