African Human Rights Coalition Condemns Trump Racist Incitement and the Weaponization of Refugees

By Melanie Nathan - NOV 10, 2025

No sitting President should chose division, dehumanization, and fear over the fundamental duty to lead with dignity, restraint, and respect for all human life. Trumps Poconos Speech is one of the most racially inflammatory ever, leading to chants in the crowd reminiscent of KKK lynch rallies of bygone years..   The African Human Rights Coalition condemns in the strongest possible terms the racist rhetoric and incitement voiced at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, where hateful tropes long associated with white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan were once again deployed, this time aimed at refugees, Africans, Muslims, and a sitting Member of Congress.

Mocking Rep. Ilhan Omar for her religion and identity, eliciting crowd responses that echoed the menace of lynch-mob politics, and resurrecting the infamous “shithole countries” slur, contrasting African nations for demonization with “countries like Sweden and Norway", for favor, is not accidental language. It is deliberate, racialized scapegoating. It draws a grotesque and unmistakable line between who is deemed worthy of humanity and belonging, and who is not, based almost entirely on skin color, religion, and ethnic origin.

This rhetoric is not merely offensive. It is dangerous.

History teaches us that when leaders normalize dehumanization, violence follows. When refugees are portrayed as threats rather than human beings, policies of exclusion, detention, family separation, ICE violence on our streets, and death in camps and at borders become politically palatable. We have seen this before - against Jews, against Black Americans, against migrants, against Muslims, and the consequences have always been catastrophic.

African refugees are not abstractions. They are survivors of war, genocide, torture, state, political snd religious persecution, famine, criminalization of sexuality and gender identity, homophobia, transphobia, and climate collapse, many fleeing conditions shaped in part by colonial legacies and contemporary global inequities. To weaponize their suffering as a political tool to “rile Americans” against people seeking safety is a moral failure of the highest order.

There is nothing inherently superior about whiteness, Europe, or Northern latitude. There is nothing inherently threatening about Africa, Blackness, or Islam. The suggestion otherwise is the foundation of racist ideology, and it has no place in this world and in any democracy.

At African Human Rights Coalition, we reject the normalization of language that emboldens extremists, fuels hate crimes, and places refugees already among the most vulnerable populations on earth at even greater risk. We call on political leaders, media institutions, civil society, and faith communities to stand to the fore and name this rhetoric for what it is: dangerous racist incitement and the encouragement of political violence, deliberately weaponized for political gain and an outright abuse of the presidency by a sitting President who has chosen division, dehumanization, and contrived fear over the fundamental duty to lead with dignity, restraint, and respect for all human life.

African Human Rights Coalition stands with refugees, with Black and African communities, with Muslims, with Jews, Asians, Journalists, immigrants, and with all those targeted by hate. Silence in moments like this is complicity. The United States must decide whether it will continue to be shaped by the politics of fear and racial hate or whether it will uphold the basic principle that human dignity is not determined by color, creed, or country of birth.