Welcome to Fortress America

Trump boots Afghan allies while rolling out the red carpet for white supremacist nostalgia.

by Julie Roginsky

We should have known that when Kristi Noem proudly announced that she murdered her dog and goat, she would not stop with animals.

We should have known that when Pete Hegseth jeopardized our national security over and over again, he would not stop with sending war plans to friends and family on Signal.

This week, Noem’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it is ending temporary protected status (TPS) for Afghan refugees in the United States. According to a notice in the Federal Register, the Afghans will be stripped of their protections in sixty days. The Trump Administration claims that TPS for the refugees is scheduled for July 12. Regardless of the timeline, they are being kicked out of a country that they considered their refuge from the ravages of Taliban rule.

In justifying this action, the Department of Homeland Security said that Noem “determined that, overall, there are notable improvements in the security and economic situation such that requiring the return of Afghan nationals to Afghanistan does not pose a threat to their personal safety due to ongoing-armed conflict or extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

Independent observers beg to differ. According to Amnesty International, Afghanistan is facing “a deepening humanitarian and human rights crisis,” where “The Taliban’s arbitrary arrests, forcible disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment and extrajudicial executions of former government employees, human rights defenders, journalists and critical voices continued.”

The Council on Foreign Relations says that since the U.S. withdrawal, the “Taliban announced a slate of new extreme laws, including banning women from parks and gyms and reintroducing public flogging and executions. In December 2022, the Taliban further rolled back women’s educational rights, barring them from university grounds and tutoring centers after having allowed them to take entrance exams earlier that year. In addition to drawing harsh international criticism, the Taliban’s strict laws prompted even Qatar and China, some of its closest partners, to lobby for an easing of restrictions in May 2023.”

The United Nations said that Afghanistan is participating in “gender apartheid” and in flogging and public executions.

Of course, none of this matters to the Trump Administration, because these refugees come from what Donald Trump likely considers a “shithole country.” Meanwhile, the president is rolling out the red carpet for white Afrikaners from South Africa, who dominated the country under the apartheid regime. They will be given refugee status immediately and fast-tracked for citizenship. Trump has justified this by saying that the Afrikaners are “being killed. And we don't want to see people be killed.” He added that "it's a genocide that's taking place."

For the record, a South African court ruled that there is no “genocide” taking place — but that means little to Trump, whose campaign donors Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sack all hail from apartheid-era South Africa.

The protections that Biden put in place in 2022 applied to Afghan refugees who had already been living in the United States and those who came here after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Now, all those people will have to go back to Afghanistan to face retribution from a regime that even other despotic nations consider extremist.

The decision to give these Afgan refugees to what may be a death sentence is more than just about the Trump Administration’s cruel immigration policy. The longest war in our nation’s history was fought in Afghanistan, with the help of Afghan nationals who joined our fight against the Taliban.

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This is where Hegseth comes in. A Secretary of Defense who cared about national security would never countenance these deportations. There are nearly 170,000 active-duty military personnel serving abroad, stationed in bases over the world. There is an undisclosed number of intelligence operatives working in all corners of the world too.

To do their jobs successfully, these troops and intelligence officers must work with the local population, as they did in Afghanistan. By some estimates, 300,000 Afghans worked with the United States during the war. They were promised a better Afghanistan, free of Taliban rule. We failed to deliver on that promise for many reasons, none of which had anything to do with their lack of commitment. Now, we are failing them again.

Despite what Trump imagines, the United States is not an island. In order to achieve “peace through strength,” as the president constantly intones, our national security infrastructure must work with local populations to achieve its goals. Though Trump has a tendency to big-foot those around him, that attitude has its limits beyond a pliant Congress and a base hopped up on MAGA talking points. It stops at the border, because other nations have priorities that do not include making America great for Trumpers and white Afrikaners.

Fortress America, which Trump is building, will not make the world safer. Deporting people to whom this nation made promises in exchange for their cooperation will not make the world safer. All it will do is ensure that the next time an American soldier comes knocking, that door will remain closed. He will either have to kick it down or move on. What he will not be able to do is to assure the person in the house that he will take care of her if she helps him.

We will feel the ramifications of these deportations long after Trump is gone (if he is ever gone). Irrespective of who the next president is or the promises he makes, people the world over now know that the United States is a fickle ally, that it does not keep its word, that it cares little for the sacrifice of its own service members and even less for the people who helped them.

It is likely that neither Noem or Hegseth thought any of this through in their quest to expel anyone who is not a white Afrikaner. While Noem is busy deporting American children and Hegseth is busy purging Black literature from military libraries, the world is watching what the United States is doing to its former allies. The message it will send back will have devastating consequences for us all.

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