The Missing Witnesses in Trump’s Trial
As the Senate begins to debate the article of impeachment against Donald Trump, I have been thinking about Srinivas Kuchibhotla. A 32-year-old software engineer from Hyderabad, India, Kuchibhotla was murdered in a Kansas bar a month after Trump’s inauguration. Adam Purinton approached Kuchibhotla, asked if he was in the country legally, called him a terrorist and demanded that he “get out of my country.” Purinton killed Kuchibhotla in February 2017, on the heels of Trump’s Presidential campaign that viciously demonized immigrants, and he invoked the same racist tropes that Trump had used to motivate his base.
Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, grieved after he was killed, asking, “What should I do? What is this life? Is it true that I cannot see Srinu? Is it true that I can’t hear his voice? Is it true I lost the person who loves me the most?” She asked in a Facebook post, “Do we belong here?” Concerned about gun violence, she had previously asked her husband if they should move to a different country: “Are we doing the right thing by staying in the United States of America?”
Seen through this wider lens, the January 6th insurrection is not an aberration, but the culmination of a campaign of terror and violence directed against Black, brown, immigrant, and Muslim communities.
I read about Kuchibhotla’s murder while conducting research for a chapter in a forthcoming book, Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies, and Movements for a Progressive Future, a collection of essays about the future of immigration policy after Trump. I felt a connection to Kuchibhotla by virtue of my own family’s decision to emigrate from India, in their case to Madison, Wisconsin, in the late 1960s. My family was part of the great wave of immigration made possible by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), the law that produced the browning of America that Trump ran against. The 1965 immigration law eliminated racist national-origin quotas that had long restricted immigration from the global south. The law was signed and celebrated by Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Although it has received far less attention than the momentous Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights Act, the 1965 immigration law was also a victory of the civil rights movement. The law’s authors did not intend to spark a massive new wave of immigration, but the result has been a transformation of the country’s demography, politics, and culture.
A week after Trump was inaugurated, the Victoria Islamic Center in Texas was burned to the ground. A few weeks after Kuchibhotla was murdered, a white supremacist traveled to New York City with the goal of finding and murdering a Black man — and did exactly that, stabbing Timothy Caughman to death and confessing to police that he harbored a deep hatred of Black men. Then, in August 2017, a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia, rammed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring over thirty others. Studies reveal a dramatic rise in hate crimes in the Trump years – what has been dubbed the “Trump Effect.” Shortly after the November 2020 election, the Trump administration’s own FBI reported that hate crimes had risen nearly twenty percent in the past four years and that hate-inspired murders reached their highest levels in 28 years.
My family was part of the great wave of immigration made possible by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), the law that produced the browning of America that Trump ran against.
Seen through this wider lens, the January 6th insurrection is not an aberration, but the culmination of a campaign of terror and violence directed against Black, brown, immigrant, and Muslim communities. Most Americans think of hate crimes and violence by right-wing groups as something marginal to the “real business” of politics and policy. However, much of the modern Republican Party has been deliberately fomenting a continuous rebellion against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, from Nixon’s southern strategy to Reagan’s dog whistles on welfare and crime, and under Trump, they very nearly succeeded. Violence by lone wolves and organized hate groups has been essential rather than incidental to their plan.
Considered as a matter of strategy, hate violence has direct and indirect effects. Fear of violence discourages migration — as it did for thousands of Indian families, shocked by what they learned about Trump’s America from wide coverage of Kuchibhotla’s murder in Indian media. Violence by private individuals and organizations, incited by politicians, can be just as effective as laws or regulations that restrict immigration. Violence against marginalized groups, when allowed to fester by majorities who don’t themselves feel endangered, gives white nationalist groups confidence. When Trump called Mexicans “rapists,” characterized the African nations from which some immigrants come as “shithole countries,” and made his infamous comments about “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, he was encouraging and legitimizing white violence in a perverse call and response.
Violence also creates fear among people who plausibly believe themselves to be potential targets. Fear is a powerful emotion, and it usually demobilizes people who feel it. It is no coincidence that the groups that mobilized first as the “resistance” in the early years of Trump were largely white and middle class, people who felt some measure of safety and security. Throughout the Trump years, we did not see mass marches of millions of immigrants of the kind we did in 2006 and 2007, for the very good reason that immigrants were afraid. In a viral video after the riot at the Capitol, Arnold Schwarzenegger invoked Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in 1938, during which Nazi mobs murdered at least 91 Jews, destroyed some 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses and at least 267 synagogues. But American history is itself replete with examples of the use of violence by private, armed groups, with the support of politicians, to restore or sustain the racial order — from the Colfax massacre of 1873 to the burning of Black Tulsa in 1921 to the 4,400 lynchings that spurred six million Black Americans to move north in the Great Migration. These attacks have been principally directed against Black and indigenous people but have also targeted immigrants, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups. White terrorism is not something aberrant in America — it has been a cornerstone of right-wing political strategies. Unchallenged, hate crimes lay the groundwork for attacks on democratic institutions and more powerful people, including even members of Congress.
There is a particular detail of the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla that haunts me. When Purinton first menaced him at that bar in Olathe, Kansas, Kuchibhotla and his friend prepared to leave the bar, rightly sensing that they were in danger. They were persuaded to stay by other patrons, who apologized for Purinton’s behavior. The manager told Purinton to leave. One of the other customers paid the tab for the Indian immigrants, and the manager bought them another round of beer and fried pickles — which Kuchibhotla particularly liked. “Everybody kept coming up to us saying this is not what we represent, you guys belong here,” Kuchibhotla’s friend said later.
Purinton then returned to the bar and shot the two men, killing Kuchibhotla. Too many white Americans and politicians have been those patrons at the bar, publicly deploring the hatred directed at vulnerable groups but comforted by the idea that “this is not who we really are,” or by the fiction that it could be contained at the margins of political life. (The execrable Nikki Haley’s plea to “give the man a break!” after Trump’s incitement to insurrection shows that brown people can be complicit, too). The Trump regime began with racialized hatred — and culminated with an insurrection threatening democracy. Trump’s conviction in the Senate is surely justified — but saving democracy will require a much deeper effort to excise the racist and nativist rot that threatens it.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla and all those we’ve lost over the last four years to racist violence won’t offer testimony in the Senate this week — but we can remember them as we take stock of the crimes of Donald J. Trump.
Deepak Bhargava is Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and co-editor (with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis) of Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies and Movements for a Progressive Future, which will be published by The New Press on April 27, 2021.
