When the history of Donald Trump’s second presidency is written, 26 November 2025 may well go down as a particular landmark.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, a lone gunman shot two West Virginia national guards, Sarah Beckstrom, and Andrew Wolfe, as they were on patrol outside Washington DC’s Farragut West metro station, a short walk from the White House – and thereby opened the floodgates to a wave of racist and anti-immigrant invective that seemed extreme even for Trump.

Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries the following day, while 24-year-old Wolfe is said to be slowly recovering from “critical” wounds.

But Trump seemed to focus less on the fates of the two guardsmembers whose deployment he had ordered to combat a supposed “crime wave” than the origins of the suspected assailant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a recent immigrant from Afghanistan.

Lakanwal, 29, who has been charged with murder, served with a CIA-linked Afghan “partner force” before arriving in the US in 2021 following Washington’s chaotic withdrawal from the long Afghan war in a resettlement program created by Joe Biden’s administration and which saw the admission of 190,000 Afghans in the country.

He was granted asylum this year by Trump’s administration, after thorough vetting, but is said to have encountered acute mental health problems.

For the president, however, such details counted for little.

The following day, Thanksgiving, he issued a social media bereft of any message of gratitude to Afghans who had been admitted to the US after helping American forces in Afghanistan.

Instead, in an extraordinary outburst, Trump suggested all Afghan arrivals should be ended and broadened his animus to cover immigrants from an undefined list of “third world counties”.

“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions…and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States,” he wrote.

He vowed to denaturalize US citizens “who undermine domestic tranquility” and deport “foreign nationals” deemed “non-compatible with Western Civilization”.

Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and architect of the president’s immigration crackdown, implied in a social media post that the true goal was ending immigration from what Trump once labelled “shithole countries” and rebutted criticism that it amounted to “collective punishment” for the crime of a single person.

“This is the great lie of mass migration,” he wrote. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

Coming after months of mass arrests carried out by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents, it seemed to foretell a fearful intensification of actions against US citizens and legal residents with origins in a startling range of foreign countries.

Such fears were borne out in the following days as the president focused on the US’s Somali community, mainly based in Minnesota. He also insulted the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, with an offensive slur after he defended ethnic Somalis and one of its members of Congress, Ilhan Omar, who emigrated from Somalia.

But it was nakedly racist nature of Trump’s comments on Somalians in general that shocked.

Having first attacked Somalians at Mar-a-Lago, and then again aboard Air Force One, he raised the ante in a meeting in a cabinet meeting in the White House, calling Somalians and Omar herself “garbage”.

“I don’t want them in our country,” he said, as Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, sat on either side of him.

“We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage, just garbage. These are people that do nothing but complain.

“Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

Shamefully, the splenetic outpouring was greeted with applause by members of Trump’s cabinet.

The diatribe recalled his outburst against Mexican immigrants in 2015, who he smeared as “rapists”, “criminals” and “drug dealers” when he launched his first presidential bid.

It also resembled his denigration of Ohio’s Haitian community in the 2024 election campaign, when he falsely accused them of eating pet cats and dogs.

Yet with Trump now holding power, the tangible impact was much greater, according to Larry Jacobs, a political professor at the University of Minnesota.

“You have Somalis who are not leaving their houses,” he said. “They don’t go to school, they’re not going to work. They expect to be kidnapped off the streets by ICE. So this is, you know, just the extraordinarily harmful, you know, actually by the president.”

“The main thing that stands out today is just the extraordinary harm that he’s done to a group of people who play a very significant and positive role for Minnesota.

“It also hurts him. The Republican party in Minnesota has been making headway in recruiting Somalis. There are plenty of Somalis who are conservative on cultural and economic issues – and what Trump is doing is shattering that effort.”

Any hopes that Trump’s sentiments would not extend beyond rhetoric has been dispelled in recent days by the actions of his closest associates and ICE agents on the ground.

New Orleans became the latest Democratic-run city to be targeted by ICE as the agency launched Operation Catahoula Crunch, in which Trump administration officials set a target of 5,000 arrests. That would surpass the numbers detained during a recent two-month crackdown in Chicago and match the figures arrested last summer in Los Angeles, a third of whose 10 million inhabitants are foreign-born.

Local authority leaders denounced the target unrealistic and said it could only be achieved by arresting those without criminal records.

ICE agents also swooped on Minnesota’s twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, where the homeland security department claimed “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” had been arrested.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced a “full travel ban” on unnamed countries in a social media post that, for sheer vitriol, matched Trump.

“I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she wrote.

“Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

On Thursday, Noem told Fox News that her travel ban would extend to 32 unspecified countries – a prohibition that would dwarf the highly controversial exclusion of ban against seven predominantly Muslim countries of Trump’s first presidency.

The effect on some legal foreign residents has already been felt, including some waiting for citizenship appointments. Some green card holders have reported having had their naturalization appointments – at which were due to become US citizens – cancelled.

Writing in the New York Times, Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the aspects of the crackdown were illegal.

“As the supreme court explained when upholding Mr Trump’s first travel ban back in 2018, the president has statutory authority to suspend entry into the United States based on national origin, at least for some period of time,” she wrote. “But that does not permit him to deny visas, cancel green cards or denaturalize immigrants based on nothing more than their country of origin.”

But Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who joined the Democrats after turning against Trump, said the president was unconcerned with legal niceties and was likely to amplify his racist demagoguery if his approval ratings continue to sag, a trend that has led to the GOP suffering several recent successive election defeats.

“He was always on this track. The reason it seems more extreme right now is his numbers are tanking,” said Walsh. “What triggers him is he’s not doing well, and Republicans aren’t doing well. He’s getting his butt handed to him in all these special elections. He doesn’t give a damn about those two national guard members.

“What they’re going to do is get uglier and uglier and more racist to appeal to their base, to try to scare voters again.

“He’s inciting violence against brown and Black immigrants in this country but I am from the right and this is the MO and their favorite go-to tactic. It’s a very scary moment.”