It was October 2025. The spotlight came on. The room fell quiet.
Fifty-three-year-old Salil Maniktahla stepped onto a stand-up stage, visibly nervous. This was not a polished set built on everyday observations. The material came from somewhere else entirely. It came from his own life.
“I grew up in rural Mississippi in the early seventies, which explains a lot about me,” he told the audience.
Growing up there, Salil learned early what it meant to be visible in the wrong way.
Looking back, he described the state plainly. “It is aggressively number 50. In everything it does, it is always aggressively dead last, like it is collecting Pokémon cards for failure.”
“Everything that could be done badly, Mississippi will do it even worse,” he added.
Salil was born in the United States in 1972, a year after his parents moved there. Then he turned to childhood.
“Growing up, I was an overachiever; it is kind of a bit like being LeBron James in a second-grade gym class. Everyone knows you don't belong, you are the wrong skin colour, and everyone hates you,” Salil joked.
The audience laughed. The line landed. But the jokes barely covered what followed.
Marked from the start
Years of abuse, discrimination and bullying shaped his childhood. The reason? His skin colour did not match what many white Americans believed belonged in their country.
“In elementary school, I was the only brown kid, and I got called the N-word. I got bullied, beaten up, harassed, just constantly. And when you are a kid, you don’t know it is not normal. I just accepted it as a kid. And then later, as an adult, I looked back at it, and I definitely felt more of a sense of rage,” Salil told me.
“Even as a kid, I would just feel frustrated and angry a lot of the time because it never felt like anyone was ever stepping in to help, you know, it was clearly an extreme bullying situation, but no adults in my life really ever intervened in any way. And I knew it was wrong, but I felt fairly powerless a lot of the time,” he continued.
It was repeatedly made clear to him that he did not belong, that he was different.
The pressure did not always arrive as open hostility. Sometimes, it worked by quietly asking him to adjust.
“When I was younger, yes. I wanted to assimilate very, very badly. I just wanted to fit in. My nickname growing up was Jay, and it was not a part of my name. My mom proposed it when I was in first grade, I believe, because so many people struggled with saying Salil in Mississippi. And in fact, my first-grade teacher, I believe, called me Sally and then she was like, how about we just call you Jay? And I was Jay until I was probably around 30. At which point I thought, why am I why am I doing this? Like, this is stupid. It's not my name. I'm just doing it to make life easier for people that I don't even know. And it literally doesn't even seem to make any difference in their attitudes. They're still exactly the same kind of jackass, whether I have an easy name or a hard name.”
The effort to assimilate did not soften the hostility. It only shifted the burden onto him.
“If you were brown, then you were the N-word. Probably right around middle school is when they started getting creative with epithets. Because it's when I first heard the term sand N-word or turban head or dot head, at least those, and even then, I remember having a bit of a sense of humour about it, like at least they're finally figuring out that I'm not black. It's very stupid, it was such a stupid time,” he said with a hearty chuckle.
This was the early 1980s. One might assume that four decades later, things would have changed.
They have not.
Same sh*t, different place
Years later, in Arlington, Virginia, Salil was out to dinner with a friend when a stranger approached their table.
“This guy, who is younger, walks in. He recognises my friend by face. And so he comes to chat with her and say hi. And in that interaction, he introduces himself to me, sticks his hand out and starts trying to crush my hand while shaking it. And he sort of refuses to let go of my hand,” Salil said.
The interaction quickly turned unsettling.
The stranger asked Salil if anyone had told him that he had beautiful eyes. Salil remembered how uncomfortable he felt.
“Then he kissed my forehead, after which I yanked my hand away.”
What followed was not embarrassment, but escalation.
“So rather than process that embarrassment, he started getting angry, and he came back. It was like he had a target, so he started unloading on me.”
The insults came fast. Sexual slurs. Threats of rape. Mockery of his Indian identity. Fantasies of violence. He told him he would be deported now that Trump was president. He promised to wait outside and “kick my ass”.
“He made fun of me being from India. He said, 'You must be a lesbian with your earrings. So you probably dance Bharatanatyam in your living room.' It's just very strange,” Salil added.
Salil tried to de-escalate. He tried not to engage. The man kept going.
“No one stepped in or intervened in any way. The restaurant did nothing.”
When the police arrived, they asked if he wanted to press charges.
He said yes.
“They really didn't feel like they were taking it seriously,” he said later.
No one had been hurt. It was just a man “running his mouth”. Something smaller than what the police usually deal with. Something easy to let go of.
Salil did not.
“I've had situations like this occur in the past, and I kind of feel like I've had enough.”
What struck him was not just the abuse, but the familiarity of it.
“He kind of slowly escalated… then he trots out this whole thing like you know Trump is president now, and you're gonna have to go back to your country, you're gonna get deported.”
The language was incoherent, but the rage? It was not.
Same script, different places
Salil’s story is not an exception; it is part of a much wider pattern, one that stretches across the United States, one that repeats itself in parks, workplaces, laundromats and hotel lobbies, more often than not without warning.
“You also see cases where it's just people living their everyday lives, getting attacked. Go to a fast food restaurant, go to the laundromat, go to school, and there's just, you never know, like out of nowhere, someone could direct an attack towards you,” Stephanie Chan, Director of Data & Research for Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition tracking racism and discrimination against Asian and Pacific Islander communities, told me.
The incidents differ in detail. The language rarely does.
“I was in the park with my three-year-old when some teenagers let out N-words and F-words,” an Indian woman in Maryland reported. “After we left, one of them followed us and said, ‘Indians smell’.”
In Texas, an Indian woman described a confrontation at work.
“A customer came in asking for help… he started yelling profanities and proceeded to say, ‘I am glad Trump is deporting you bitches. I hope you have a green card'.”
In a laundromat, a graduate student watched a stranger’s smile turn to rage.
“I don’t want to see ugly, smelly Asians here!” the woman shouted, before smashing a dryer door and storming out.
Others describe quieter humiliation.
“Workers refused to allow me to sign up for a class… told me my kind aren't valued there,” a woman in Los Angeles County reported. “As I left, the employee gestured the middle finger towards me.”
Sometimes it is reduced to a single sentence.
“At a hotel lobby, a person walked by an Indian American man and yelled, ‘go back to India!’”
Different places. Different people.
The same language.
However, what makes it different now is how openly it is expressed.
And how closely it follows power.
When stories start repeating
The stories from parks, workplaces and laundromats are a pattern.
That pattern becomes much clearer when personal accounts are placed alongside data collected over time.
According to STOP AAPI Hate, tens of thousands of slurs targeting South Asians circulate across online spaces every month.
The organisation tracks hate through three main channels: a national survey, a reporting centre where people submit incidents they have experienced or witnessed, and online monitoring carried out with research partners who focus on extremist and high-risk digital spaces.
What we can understand from this data is not just the massive scale of the hate acts, but also when it happened.
Since January 2023, STOP AAPI Hate has documented a steady rise in anti–South Asian hate online. The graph features three distinct spikes -- and they are not something that appeared randomly. Each of these spikes followed moments when South Asians were put under the spotlight in American public life.
The first spike came after the entry of Kamala Harris into the presidential race, alongside the increased visibility of other Indian-origin political figures, like the wife of JD Vance, Usha Vance. Online spaces associated with extremist rhetoric saw a sudden surge in slurs and threats, despite no corresponding event involving the wider South Asian community.
The second, and most significant, spike came immediately after Donald Trump returned to office following the 2024 election. In the weeks that followed, online hate targeting South Asians intensified alongside renewed political debates around immigration, particularly H-1B visas.
A third spike followed months later, as geopolitical tensions rose and Zohran Mamdani gained national attention after winning the Democratic primary in New York City. That visibility triggered another wave of racially charged and Islamophobic abuse online.
Salil noticed the shift long before it appeared in datasets.
“After Trump was elected the first time in 2016, that’s really when I saw this kind of spike,” he said, recalling an increase in harassment in his own neighbourhood.
FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in 25 years.
The underlying connection among all the spikes is simple -- visibility and hate rhetoric.
As Stephanie explained, increases in political, cultural or global visibility are often followed by surges in hate directed not just at public figures, but at the broader ordinary South Asian population going about their daily lives.
Data suggests that when South Asians enter national conversations, whether through elections, policy debates or international events, online spaces quickly respond with language that seeks to push them back out.
While most of the time these hate campaigns restrict themselves to cyberspace, sometimes they step off the screen -- thanks to the racist rhetoric being fuelled by MAGA cultists.
The numbers reveal when hate spikes. The language reveals how it operates.
The slurs dominating online spaces today are not just random insults. They are part of a long tradition of using words to mark who belongs, and who does not.
Sometimes words speak louder
Terms like “Jeet” and “Pajeet”, “Chink” and “Ching Chang Chong”, “Gook” and “Paki” dominate many of the online spaces where South Asians are targeted today.
Some of these slurs are products of the internet age, born in anonymous forums like 4chan and extremist message boards. Others have circulated for decades, embedded in American history and public life.
What connects them is not just cruelty, but function.
Slurs rarely emerge at random. They appear during moments of uncertainty and anxiety, such as economic pressure, political change, or demographic shifts. Moments when fear demands a target.
Language becomes a pathway to turn entire communities into cardboard cutouts, to mass generalisation, making them easier to blame, exclude or threaten.
Experts tracking online hate say that many of the most common slurs used against South Asians today first appeared in far-right digital spaces before spreading outward. Repetition does the rest. What begins as fringe speech becomes familiar. Familiar becomes acceptable. And acceptable becomes usable.
Over time, these words travel. They slip from comment sections to classrooms, workplaces and streets.
Long before online platforms existed, the same process unfolded through newspapers, political speeches and pop-culture.
In the early twentieth century, South Asian immigration was framed as a “dusky peril”, presented as an even greater threat than the so-called “yellow peril”.
Newspapers and political speeches warned of racial contamination, economic competition and cultural decay. The language helped justify exclusionary laws long before violence followed.
During the Second World War, Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated after being transformed, through words, into enemies. Slurs like “jap” and “nip” entered mainstream use, reducing people to threats and making mass punishment seem acceptable.
After 9/11, South Asian and Muslim Americans were broadly labelled “terrorists”, regardless of nationality or religion. Surveillance, detention and profiling followed.
Two decades later came the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pattern repeated itself. When Donald Trump used phrases like “China virus” and “kung flu”, anti-Asian slurs surged nationwide, followed by physical attacks and harassment.
Language moved first. Violence came behind.
In today’s hyper-connected world, slurs travel faster, reach wider audiences and solidify into shared vocabularies of hate. Words coined in extremist right-wing forums can enter mainstream political discourse within days. When repeated by people in positions of authority, they gain legitimacy, even when rooted in falsehood.
Slurs are often dismissed as “just words”. They are not.
Each carries a lineage of fear and exclusion. Each helps define who belongs and who does not.
Language does not stay contained. Once normalised, it begins to shape behaviour, whether in online spaces or in offline ones.
And once behaviour shifts, words no longer need explanation; they arrive with pre-conceived notions.
Same script, different crisis
Language not only dehumanises in the moment; it follows a script, one that resurfaces whenever fear needs a face.
Each surge of racial hostility in the United States arrives with the assurance that it is exceptional. That this time is different. That the danger is new.
History suggests otherwise.
I asked Manjusha Kulkarni, Co-Founder of Stop AAPI Hate and Executive Director of AAPI Equity Alliance, and Stephanie to compare the current rise in anti–South Asian hate with earlier moments, particularly after 9/11 and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Each is slightly different than the other, though they all fall under the rubric of anti-Asian or anti-AAPI hate,” Manjusha said.
After 9/11, the logic was national security. Muslim Americans were blamed collectively for an act carried out by a few. Because a large proportion of Muslims in the United States trace their roots to South Asia, the fallout landed heavily on South Asian communities. Low-income families were especially exposed, facing heightened police scrutiny, harassment and discrimination, particularly in large metropolitan areas.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the trigger shifted. The origins of the virus were externalised, racialised and simplified. Chinese Americans were blamed first, then Asian Americans more broadly. What mattered was not accuracy, but appearance.
In both moments, the targets quickly expanded beyond the group originally named. Sikh Americans wearing turbans were attacked after 9/11, not because perpetrators understood who they were, but because visual cues replaced knowledge.
During the pandemic, anyone who “looked East Asian” -- people of Korean, Japanese, and Southeast Asian origin -- became fair game.
What united these episodes was not the identity of the scapegoat, but the mechanism.
“After 9/11, it was national security scapegoating. With COVID-19, it was public health scapegoating. And now with this current rise in anti-South Asian hate, it’s economic scapegoating,” she said.
At a moment of sustained economic pressure, such as rising prices, unaffordable housing, and job insecurity, resentment looks for a target. Immigration, particularly skilled migration, becomes an easy explanation for structural failure. Suddenly, blame replaces policy.
Manjusha places this cycle within a longer American tradition.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of the late 19th century, and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, were not spontaneous public reactions but government-initiated responses that legitimised collective punishment.
What is unfolding now follows the same architecture. Communities are not targeted for what they have done, but for what they represent during moments of national anxiety.
The present wave is still taking shape. So far, Indian Americans appear to be the primary focus, but history suggests the boundaries will not hold. Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and Nepali communities sit within the same line of sight.
The lesson, repeated across decades, is simple. In times of crisis, America does not just look for answers. It looks for someone to blame.
And once that script is written and repeated, it does not remain confined to history books or online forums, it looks for somewhere to be acted out.
From the screens to the streets
Hate, more often than not, is dismissed as noise. It is ugly, it is offensive; however, it was restricted to the screen, or so it was believed.
The very thick line between online hate and real-life hate crime has been blurred entirely.
The language circulating online does not remain confined to digital spaces. It shapes how people speak, what they feel permitted to say, and increasingly, how they act.
In recent years, slurs and threats directed at South Asians have travelled from fringe message boards to mainstream platforms, and from there into everyday interactions in the real world.
Harassment increasingly borrows from political rhetoric and debates. Phrases that often mirror campaign slogans and official talking points surface in everyday spaces.
The escalation is not always physical, it is deliberate.
Threats now invoke the power of the state. Deportation, detention and surveillance are used as tools of intimidation, regardless of a person’s legal status.
The message is no longer just hostility, but control, a reminder that belonging can be questioned, revoked or taken away without a moment’s notice.
This is not something that happened accidentally.
Digital spaces reward repetition. Slurs, conspiracy theories and false claims are amplified through algorithms that prioritise engagement over facts and accuracy. Over time, exposure hardens into belief. What begins as rhetoric becomes justification - an echo chamber is born.
What becomes clear, both from research and from lived experience, is that when dehumanising language is repeated enough times, it lowers the barrier to harm. The move from speech to action does not require coordination. It requires permission - the sense that certain targets are acceptable, and that consequences are unlikely.
For South Asians in the United States, this has translated into a new kind of vulnerability. Abuse no longer feels random. It feels rehearsed. The same phrases repeat across different states, spoken by different people, as if drawn from a shared script.
The result is a climate where fear operates quietly. People hesitate before speaking up, before drawing attention to themselves.
Online hate may begin as words. But when those words are repeated, legitimised and carried into the real world, they begin to function as threats.
And increasingly, they are treated as such.
For many, that threat is no longer abstract or lurking in the shadows.
It now arrives with flashing lights and sirens, masks, unmarked vehicles and legal authority.
It no longer stops at words, but carries the weight of the state.
Knock, Knock; ICE there?
In recent years, harassment has increasingly invoked immigration enforcement as a tool of intimidation.
“I’ll call ICE.” “Trump will deport you.” “You won’t be here much longer.”
These phrases reflect a growing awareness that government power can be summoned casually and that it does not always discriminate carefully between citizens, permanent residents, students or visa holders.
Manjusha explained how people now use the authority of the state as part of everyday harassment.
“Now people are saying, ‘Trump will deport you,’” she said. “They’re using the power of the state in their harassment.”
What makes this moment distinct is not simply the presence of racism, but the way enforcement has been used to spearhead it.
Reports describe individuals being picked up in public places, transported far from their communities and held without clear information about where they are or when they will be released. In some cases, people are detained despite having valid documentation.
Recollecting one such incident, Manjusha told me.
“One individual here in Los Angeles was on a bus, and then ICE came and dragged him off the bus, took him to a detention facility 200 miles away. He was there incommunicado. Nobody knew where he was.”
He was released two days later.
“He has a valid visa,” she added.
The message these incidents send is not subtle.
Legal status does not guarantee protection. Due process is no longer assumed. The boundary between documented and undocumented begins to blur.
For many, the uncertainty itself becomes the punishment.
The impact reaches beyond those without citizenship. Families with long histories in the United States report making contingency plans, getting OCI cards if they haven't had it already, making sure they're ready should they need to leave at a moment's notice for the safety of themselves and their family members.
“I came to the United States when I was two with my parents. My husband came from India when he was three with his parents and sister. And we're very worried. We've lived here for over 50 years and we're worried for ourselves and our children. And I didn't think I would ever be saying that,” Manjusha said.
Fear, in this context, is not hysteria. It is a strategic calculation.
When enforcement appears unpredictable, visibility itself becomes risky. Speaking out feels dangerous. Silence begins to feel like self-preservation.
This is how racism operates when it is embedded in systems rather than shouted from street corners. It does not need mobs. It does not require flashy spectacles. It works through procedures, and for those caught within them, the damage is often quiet and often devastating.
It was shaped, encouraged and normalised from the top.
The point is simple, such words have the power to flatten identities and erase differences. Coincidentally, that has been the purpose of the MAGA campaign.
Which brings us to the main cause behind the recent surge in hate against south-Asians -- the re-emergence of the MAGA echo chamber.
The Second Coming of the Trum-pest
Every movement needs a prophet. MAGA found one.
Donald Trump did not arrive as a saviour from nowhere. He was announced, prepared, and recognised long before he descended the escalator.
To his followers, he was not merely a candidate. He was restoration made flesh. The man who would take the country back. The one who would punish enemies and cleanse institutions.
When Trump announced his return to presidential politics in November 2022, he spoke in the language of deliverance.
“We have to save our country.”
America, he suggested, had fallen. It had been corrupted. Taken over. Redemption required force.
This was not a conversion. It was confirmation.
Long before MAGA had a name, Trump’s public life followed a familiar script. In 1973, the US Department of Justice sued Trump and his company, Trump Management, for housing discrimination against African Americans. The allegation was simple: Black renters were turned away, lied to, or steered elsewhere. Trump settled the case by agreeing to stop the practices, without admitting wrongdoing.
There was no confession. No repentance. Only denial.
In 1989, when a white woman was assaulted in Central Park, Trump did not wait for a trial. He placed full-page advertisements calling for the death penalty. Five Black and Latino teenagers -- Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise -- were accused and convicted.
Years later, DNA evidence proved they were innocent. The convictions were overturned. The city acknowledged the injustice.
Trump did not.
More than three decades later, the same men, now in their 50s, filed a lawsuit against Trump for defamation, accusing him of repeating false claims about them during a presidential debate. Even then, there was no reckoning. Only insistence.
In MAGA theology, the chosen one does not apologise.
Between 2011 and 2016, Trump became the high priest of the birther conspiracy, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The lie was disproved. Trump repeated it anyway. Belonging, once again, was the target. Citizenship was something to be doubted, withdrawn, denied.
This is the doctrine that underpins MAGA: America is pure only when it is white, Christian, and unchallenged. Everyone else is provisional.
Central to this belief system is the claim of “anti-white racism”. The claim that recasts historical dominance as injury and privilege as persecution. In this framing, efforts to address inequality are taken as attacks, and demands for inclusion are treated as acts of aggression.
Diversity is no longer presented as a social reality, but as discrimination. Multiculturalism becomes contamination. Demographic change is framed not as evolution, but as invasion.
This rhetoric does not exist in isolation. It echoes through campaign speeches, policy debates, media appearances and online spaces, reinforcing a worldview in which America is imagined as something that has been taken, diluted, or corrupted.
South Asians -- increasingly visible in politics, technology and public life -- become convenient stand-ins for these anxieties, regardless of their individual actions or beliefs.
What follows is not merely a change in tone, but a shift in permission.
When national leaders speak of the country being “taken over” or its “blood being poisoned”, they redraw the boundaries of acceptable speech.
After Trump returned to office following the 2024 election, online hate directed at South Asians surged, closely tracking campaign rhetoric and subsequent policy debates. Immigration became a focal point for resentment.
This was not unprecedented. During Trump’s first term, similar spikes followed moments when immigration, race and national identity were foregrounded. What changed the second time was intensity. The language grew sharper. The policies more aggressive. The institutions enforcing them more emboldened.
By the time Trump left office in 2020, two-thirds of surveyed Americans told the ACLU that he had increased racial tensions in the country.
Grievance politics thrives on simplification. Complex social and economic problems are reduced to slogans, and entire communities are flattened into symbols that are blamed not for what they have done, but for what they represent.
Trump’s language reflects this belief. Immigrants “poison the blood”. Demographic change is framed as an invasion. Equality is framed as persecution.
In a recent statement on South Africa, Trump claimed, in typical Trump fashion without evidence, that white farmers were facing “genocide”.
He accused the government of killing white people and stealing their land, while casting the international media as complicit through silence. On the basis of this claim, he proposed punishment: exclusion from global forums, withdrawal of cooperation, and public condemnation.
The episode was not about South Africa. It was about grievance. Whiteness was positioned as endangered, violence was asserted without proof, and authority was invoked to promise consequences.
The facts were secondary. It was foreign policy spoken like scripture.
The righteous named. The wicked condemned. Consequences promised.
The same logic travels easily across borders, and when applied at home, it places visible, non-white communities like South Asians firmly on the other side of belonging.
This is how Trump governs language. Falsehoods are not mistakes. They are revelations. Each claim, no matter how debunked, is treated as truth because it feels true to the faithful.
What more can you expect from a “narcissistic man-child surrounded by yes men”.
MAGA does not require accuracy. It requires belief.
For South Asians in the United States, this matters even when Trump does not name them directly. MAGA works by ranking who belongs and who does not. It operates through hierarchy. Through the idea that some belong by divine right, while others remain guests.
When a leader speaks of “taking the country back”, the question is always the same: back from whom?
Visibility becomes provocation. Presence becomes transgression.
The language spoken from pulpits of power travels downward. It appears later in restaurants, offices, parks and classrooms. Harassment borrows the tone of prophecy. Threats arrive dressed as destiny.
What Trump offers his followers is not just policy. It is absolution.
Absolution for suspicion.
Absolution for cruelty.
Absolution for the belief that exclusion is righteousness.
In MAGA, Trump is not seen as accountable for the consequences of his language He is treated as the voice of truth and reason. And like all messianic figures, he does not need to be right.
He only needs believers.
After the signal
Movements do not run on belief alone. They require systems that repeat a belief until it feels normal.
Political rhetoric does not act in isolation. It travels through platforms, institutions and intermediaries that absorb, amplify and normalise it.
Over the past decade, an ecosystem has formed around grievance politics, one that does not reflect hostility but distributes it.
At the centre of this ecosystem is repetition.
Claims about immigration, race and national decline are circulated endlessly, stripped of context and consequence. Complexity is a liability. Simplicity travels faster. What survives is not what is accurate, but what is repeatable.
Social media accelerates this process. Platforms reward outrage with visibility, pushing the most inflammatory content furthest and fastest.
Stephanie points to how this environment reshapes authority itself.
“Trump spends so much time on social media,” she said.
“And one of the ways he kind of susses out who is loyal is by looking at what people are posting. Checking whether they are aligned with him, or if they are favourable to him.”
In this ecosystem, loyalty replaces competence. Visibility becomes the main qualification.
The result is an administration and a political culture, shaped not by expertise but by amplification. Podcast hosts, influencers and online provocateurs move seamlessly into positions of power, not despite their extremism, but because of it. Their social media reach, useful. Their aggression signals allegiance.
Manjusha describes this as structural rather than incidental. Trump, she said, “purposely picks people who are unqualified, because what that then does is it ramps up the loyalty. They know they are only in those positions because of their loyalty, not because of competence.”
However, loyalty is also only relevant if you belong to a colour of his choice.
According to research, Trump has assembled the least diverse US government of the 21st century, filling the corridors of power with white men at the expense of women and people of colour.
Nine in 10 individuals confirmed by the Senate in the first 300 days of the second Trump administration were white.
Trump has also used online spaces to spread his hate politics. Influencers do not merely comment on political developments; they translate them into usable language such as slogans, jokes, threats and slurs that can be easily redeployed. The line between commentary and instruction blurs.
Mainstream media, meanwhile, struggles to respond without reinforcing the cycle.
In the pursuit of balance, explicit racism is often reframed as controversy. Statements are paraphrased to soften their impact. Harmful claims are discussed without being named directly. What should alarm instead becomes debatable, becomes quirky. The effect is dilution, the effect is harm.
Technology companies sit comfortably within this structure.
Platforms that once promoted themselves as neutral hosts increasingly shape what is seen, shared and suppressed. Safeguards against hate speech and misinformation have been weakened or completely removed. Engagement and access outweigh safety.
As Stephanie put it very bluntly, “Meta, as well as X, don’t even want to address safety and hate speech anymore. They’ve removed a lot of the protections they had before.”
The consequences are clear. Language that circulates freely online becomes portable. It moves from comment sections into workplaces, classrooms and public spaces, carried by people who feel increasingly confident that they will face little resistance.
Together, these forces create what researchers call as permission structures.
No one is explicitly told to harass, threaten or intimidate. Instead, they pick up on cues - Who is protected. Who is suspect. What language is acceptable. What consequences are unlikely.
For South Asians navigating this landscape, harassment feels coordinated even when it is not. The same phrases recur across different states, spoken by different people, as if drawn from a shared script.
The system does not invent prejudice. It sustains it, it gives it confidence, reach and durability.
And once sustained, it no longer needs to shout. It simply waits to be acted upon.
Then it acts
Permission, once granted, looks for something to act through.
Once hostility is normalised, it seeks instruments. In the United States, those instruments are policies, agencies and people empowered to act in the name of the state. What begins as rhetoric is translated into enforcement. What feels like belief becomes procedure.
This system did not come together on its own. It has been shaped by figures who rarely occupy the spotlight but exert lasting influence over how power is used. Among them is Stephen Miller, the long-time architect of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, whose work across administrations has focused less on reform than on restriction, deterrence and spectacle.
Policies bearing his imprint have expanded enforcement while narrowing accountability, turning immigration law into a tool not just of regulation, but of intimidation.
“Not only has he been an influence, he’s actually the one who executes the policies, right? So it is his plans that are going forward,” Manjusha said.
“He has been very clear about efforts to detain and deport people even since the first term.”
For South Asians, this shift has been marked by the increasing use of immigration enforcement as a tool of intimidation. Deportation, detention and investigation are no longer distant bureaucratic processes. They are invoked casually, often by strangers, as threats.
“We have received numerous incident reports where an individual was just at a restaurant and somebody came up to him and said, ‘Trump will deport you,’” Manjusha said.
“So when people on the right say there’s nothing coordinated, that these are just policies, that’s not true. His supporters understand the link between rhetoric, policy and action.”
This is not limited to undocumented people.
Detentions have been reported involving international students, visa holders and even those who have US citizenship. People have been picked up in public places, held without clear explanation, and released days later without charges. The uncertainty is the point. When enforcement appears arbitrary, everyone becomes vulnerable.
Speaking on the misadventures of ICE, Stephanie says, “ICE is terrorising our communities. People are staying home. They’re not going out. Their lives are being completely disrupted by the fear that they will get deported unlawfully.”
What makes this moment more unsettling is that the machinery is not operated solely by those outside the communities being targeted.
Indian Americans themselves occupy key positions within it. Far from being symbolic appointments, they are actively taking part in reshaping civil rights enforcement and immigration policy. Their presence further complicates any simple narrative of representation as protection.
As Manjusha pointed out, “There are two Indian Americans who are actively participating in that. Kash Patel and Harmeet Dhillon. Harmeet Dhillon is supposedly the head of the Civil Rights Division. She’s actually made a mockery of that with her actions.”
Representation, in this context, does not protect the people or soften the system. It legitimises it.
State power does not discriminate based on shared identity. It operates through authority, not solidarity. When people from marginalised communities administer exclusionary policies, the system does not become less hostile. It becomes harder to challenge.
And the consequences are visible everywhere.
The instances such as the international student being pulled off a bus by immigration authorities mentioned earlier are not isolated errors. They are signals.
As Manjusha put it, “These are kidnappings. These are abductions. Most of them are without any warrants. There’s no government authorisation. They’re just picking people up.”
What emerges is not chaos, but control.
The state does not need to announce repression loudly, but here it does, and then, permission has fully transformed into power.
Fear, silence, survival
The most immediate consequence of this environment is not confrontation. It is withdrawal.
Across South Asian communities, fear shapes ordinary decisions. People think twice before reporting abuse, before speaking publicly, before drawing attention to themselves. The risk is not just further harassment, but scrutiny from everywhere, including the state.
For those on temporary visas, the calculation is constant. Students, skilled workers and families with time-bound status learn quickly that visibility carries cost. A single incident can feel consequential. A misunderstanding can feel dangerous. Silence becomes a form of protection.
Stephanie sees this pattern repeatedly in the reports STOP AAPI Hate receives.
“There’s a lot of trepidation in sharing with us,” she said. “Community leaders tell us their people are experiencing this, but they don’t want to report. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves right now.”
The fear extends beyond those without legal status.
Citizens and permanent residents also describe altering their behaviour. Protests are avoided. Online activity is limited. Political opinions are softened or withheld entirely. Big Brother is watching -- the mania, real or imagined, becomes part of daily life.
Reporting mechanisms exist, but trust in them is uneven. Many incidents go unreported, not because they are minor, but because the cost of speaking feels higher than the promise of resolution.
Stephanie described the findings of a recent student survey.
“A lot of the fear we’re hearing from students is, ‘I’m going to be detained. I’m going to lose my child.’” Even when no law has changed, the atmosphere has.
For some families, preparation has replaced expectation.
The psychological toll is cumulative. Anxiety becomes routine. Normal activities require calculation. Public spaces that once felt familiar begin to feel exposed.
And yet, survival also takes quieter forms.
Mutual aid networks grow discreetly. Community groups share information under the radar. People look out for one another in ways that rarely make headlines. Resistance, in this context, is not always loud. Sometimes, it is simply persistence; it is survival.
Silence should not be mistaken for acceptance. In many cases, it is the price of staying safe.
Pushback, uneven and incomplete
But fear has not gone unanswered.
Across the United States, resistance has begun to surface, albeit unevenly, and often cautiously. Protests, electoral shifts and community organising suggest that while intimidation has reshaped daily life for many, it has not gone uncontested.
Large-scale demonstrations have drawn many into public spaces, framing the present moment not as routine politics but as a challenge to democratic norms themselves. These gatherings have brought together people across racial and ideological lines, united less by agreement on policy than by a shared concern about the concentration of power and the erosion of rights.
For Stephanie, these moments matter, even when their impact feels limited. “People are gathering around the protection of democracy,” she said, referring to the nationwide No Kings protests.
“It’s a big enough umbrella that grabs people who disagree on a lot of things, but can still agree on that.”
When hate spills from the screen to the streets, so does the pushback. The number of people attending the October 18, 2025 'No Kings' protest exceeded that of both Trump inaugurations combined.
Signs of pushback have also emerged at the ballot box. In several high-profile races, candidates who centred affordability, civil rights and inclusion outperformed expectations, despite facing sustained racial and religious attacks.
For South Asian voters in particular, turnout reflected a growing recognition that visibility carries risk, but silence carries cost.
Stephanie said Mamdani’s recent win in New York City “felt like a loud repudiation of what’s been happening.”
Younger voters have played a notable role in this shift. On college campuses and in urban centres, long lines and high participation rates suggest a generation less willing to treat authoritarian politics as background noise. For many, this is not an abstract debate, but a question of personal safety and future possibility.
However, Manjusha remains cautious about overstating what this means.
“The far right people will never change,” she said. “But there may be a middle ground where people are waking up, especially when their economic interests are at stake.”
Community organisations have also stepped into the gaps left by institutions. Legal aid groups, advocacy networks and grassroots collectives have expanded their work quietly, often under-resourced and overstretched. Their efforts rarely attract national attention, but they provide infrastructure where official systems have failed to inspire trust.
“We as a citizenry have shown much more courage and bravery than elected officials have. And sadly, we can't win this fight unless we work together across all sectors,” Manjusha said.
None of this guarantees change.
“The coming year will be decisive in what happens for the rest of my lifetime,” she added.
The forces driving resentment and exclusion remain powerful, well-funded and deeply entrenched. Gains, where they exist, are partial and reversible. Progress does not arrive evenly, and it does not arrive safely.
But these moments of resistance matter precisely because they occur within a climate designed to shrink public space. They challenge the idea that fear is total, or that permission to intimidate goes uncontested.
Participation, in this context, is not triumph. It is refusal - a refusal that, at its narrowest, is left with just three words --
fight fight fight…
…Not as a chant or a vow, but a decision to remain present within a system that strives to wear people down.
A year into a familiar administration, the accounts gathered across interviews, data and incident reports point to a climate that has not cooled. If anything, it has hardened. What once surfaced at the margins now appears with greater confidence, borrowing the language of politics, policy and power.
For many South Asians in the United States, the threat is no longer abstract or episodic. It is ambient. It sits inside ordinary life, shaping how visible one can afford to be.
Salil understands this instinctively. When he walks onto a stage, he does not frame himself as a survivor or a spokesperson. He tells stories. He jokes. He lets the audience laugh. But the laughter is never detached from what sits beneath it -- a childhood shaped by hostility, an adulthood lived with vigilance, and a present in which old language has returned with new authority.
Comedy does not insulate him from what is happening outside the room. It does not undo the years of being told he did not belong, or the more recent reminders that belonging can still be questioned, withdrawn, or taken away. What it offers instead is something narrower, and more fragile: a way to speak without asking permission. A way to be visible without apology.
For Salil, the question of belonging has never resolved itself into a single place.
“I don't think I've ever fully felt at home in America. I feel like I've carved out my own little spaces. And there have been times where I've let my guard down. But as an adult, I've been very aware that that can get snatched away very quickly.
“A lot of the anger or resentment I feel has to do with me living my life, minding my business, and then something will happen that just reminds me that I am not treated as if I belong here, that I'm not American, that I am something else. And also that I should be happy about it. I should be grateful for the privilege of being allowed to live here at all and that they can take it away from me, rightly or not.”
India does not offer him refuge either. When he returns, he is reminded just as quickly that he does not fully belong there. He is read as American, shaped by distance, accent and absence. What is denied in one place is not reclaimed in the other.
There is no neat ending to this story. The forces that exclude remain active. Some people respond through art. Some through organising. Some through silence. None of these responses promises safety. None promises resolution.
History rarely returns all at once. More often, it moves quietly, repeating itself in familiar forms, until the question is no longer whether it is coming but when. As Yeats ominously asked in The Second Coming, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”