>Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants.

There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.

And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.

And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.

White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.

[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...

[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...