Donald Trump’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services promoted white supremacist ideas in an interview with the far-right outlet Breitbart, claiming that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies were a response to liberals trying to change the country’s population for political gain.
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow’s statements to Breitbart, a platform known for promoting racist ideas, reflected the main idea of the so-called great replacement theory. This theory claims that liberals—sometimes specifically Jewish liberals—are trying to bring nonwhite immigrants into majority-white countries to change the population and win elections.
This is a false and racist conspiracy theory that has been promoted by mass killers and even echoed by the president of the United States. But the person in charge of America’s citizenship process and immigration programs appeared to give it some credibility.
According to Breitbart, he said:
“Anything the Biden administration could do to get a bigger foothold from an illegal population in this country, they were going to do. I mean, their long-term plan, I think we have to assume, was to grant some sort of mass amnesty, make them all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere throughout the country.”
This is clearly bigoted and conspiratorial. But many top officials in Trump’s administration have been known to support white supremacist ideas, including White House policy director Stephen Miller and State Department official Darren Beattie. Joseph Edlow now appears to join that group.
