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“Libs of TikTok” creator Chaya Raichik officially joined the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant propaganda campaign this week, accompanying Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on a “ride-along” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
Raichik, a self-proclaimed attendee of the January 6 coup attempt, who rose to fame over the past several years by spreading anti-transgender propaganda on social media (with dangerous consequences), posted several photos of herself with Noem on Elon Musk’s X platform this week. Noem and Raichik traveled to Phoenix with a group of ICE agents for a series of photo ops, as ICE arrested multiple people whom Raichik called “dirtbags” and whom she claimed (without evidence) were undocumented immigrants and gang members.
In the photos, Raichik is seen in an armored vehicle wearing a tactical vest with what appears to be an ICE badge clipped on her left side. “Phoenix, Arizona just became a lot safer!” Raichik declared. She went on to post “exclusive footage” of some of the arrests on her Libs of TikTok platforms.
This week’s photo op was a significant escalation of Raichik’s propaganda machine, but not an unexpected one. Though she’s forged a lucrative career in right-wing politics based largely on her hyperbolic antipathy for trans people, Raichik has broadened her focus over time to attack immigrant communities as well, and now regularly posts about immigrants’ alleged criminal activity. In those posts, Raichik parrots Trump administration lines about how such alleged crimes are a result of supposedly lax immigration enforcement under former President Joe Biden. (Under Biden, the U.S. government deported or otherwise expelled at least 4.4 million people, more than in any single presidential term since George W. Bush, according to the Migration Policy Institute.)
Policies that seek to scapegoat and eliminate trans people, like the Trump administration’s, are themselves an integral part of the right-wing project to build white Christian nationalism in the U.S. Few are better symbols of that project than Raichik, who demonstrates that the Venn diagram of xenophobia and transphobia is a circle. It is, after all, no accident that one of Trump’s most enduring statements of the 2024 campaign was his mid-debate attack accusing former Vice President Kamala Harris of endorsing “transgender operations on illegal aliens,” nor that the administration’s new passport policies target both trans people and immigrants, merging the two issues via which Republicans have most successfully propagandized U.S. voters.
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