Trump vows to slam America’s doors shut as he heaps scorn on immigrants

National guard shooting prompts extraordinary outburst and targeting of people from startling range of countries

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.