President Donald Trump holds a photo while speaking to reporters after speaking to troops via video from his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thanksgiving on Thursday, November 27, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida – President Donald Trump vowed to “permanently stop migration” from poor countries on Thanksgiving, posting a scathing anti-immigrant tirade on social media late at night.
The extended statement came in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting of two members of the National Guard deployed to patrol Washington, DC, under Trump’s orders, one of whom died shortly before he spoke to US troops by video on Thursday evening.
A 29-year-old Afghan national who worked with the CIA during the Afghanistan war has been accused of the shooting. The suspect left there as part of a program to resettle people who had helped American troops after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Only reverse migration can completely fix this situation,” Trump posted on his Truth social platform. “Also, thanks to everyone, except those who hate, steal, murder and destroy everything America stands for – you won’t be here long!”
Trump’s threat to curb immigration would be a serious blow to a country that has long defined itself as welcoming of immigrants.
Elected on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, Trump’s raids and deportations have disrupted communities across the US as construction sites and schools have been targeted. The possibility of more deportations could be economically dangerous as America’s foreign-born workers number about 31 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The President said on Truth Social that “the majority” of foreign-born American residents “are on welfare, from failed countries, or in prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels” as he blamed them for crime across the country that is primarily committed by American citizens.
According to a review of the academic literature last year in the Annual Review of Criminology, the notion that immigration leads to crime is “weakening under the weight of the evidence.”
It states, “With a few exceptions, studies conducted at both the aggregate and individual levels show that higher concentrations of immigrants are not associated with increased levels of crime and delinquency in neighborhoods and cities in the United States.”
A study by economists released early in 2023 found that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. The study found that immigrants have been incarcerated at lower rates for 150 years, undermining Trump’s claims in previous research.
But Trump seemed to have no interest in the policy debate in his unusually long social media post, which the White House called “one of the most important messages President Trump has ever issued” on its quick-response social media account.
Trump claimed that immigrants from Somalia are “completely taking over the once great state of Minnesota” as he used an old slang term for the intellectually disabled to disparage that state’s governor, Tim Walz, who was last year’s Democratic vice presidential nominee, calling him “severely retarded.”
Since the shooting, Trump has intensified his rhetoric. On Wednesday night, Trump called for re-vetting of all Afghan refugees entering under the Biden administration.
On Thursday, Joseph Edlow, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency would take additional steps to screen people from 19 “high-risk” countries “to the greatest extent possible.”
Edlow did not name the countries. But in June, the administration banned travel to the US from citizens of 12 countries and restricted access from seven others, citing national security concerns.
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