I will never forget watching Kunta Kinte in the 1977 TV miniseries, “Roots,” fighting to keep his name as an overseer’s whip came down again and again.
His determination was a brutal reminder of how white settlers used language to transform Black people into commodities: bought, sold, shipped and stripped of their identities. From “Roots,” I witnessed how slavery was designed to remove Black people’s humanity and brand them as products.
That memory resurfaced over Easter when President Donald Trump issued a a holiday message calling immigrants murderers, drug lords, dangerous prisoners, mentally insane and wife beaters.
In one social media post, millions of people seeking safety and opportunity were transformed into a monolithic threat, each label systematically stripping away their humanity and reducing them to dangerous caricatures worthy of fear rather than constitutional protection.
This dehumanization crystallized in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported by the U.S. government in what officials admitted was as an “administrative error.” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared during a meeting with Trump that he would not return Abrego Garcia to the United States despite a U.S. Supreme Court order.
Even as U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., met with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, the Trump administration’s stance hasn’t changed. In fact, when questioned about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, White House official Stephen Miller coldly stated: “He has no lawful right to be here. … It’s up to El Salvador what the fate of their own citizens is.”
In one breath, a human being with legal rights became a clerical mistake, then a foreign problem to be discarded.
As a literacy scholar, I know how words are strategically deployed to dehumanize. Studies show white settlers used words like heathen, brute and savage to justify enslavement. My own work, reveals how dehumanizing labels for Black women and girls directly lead to violence.
These linguistic maneuvers also pervade the immigration system. Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently compared deportation logistics to “Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours. … Trying to figure out how to do that with human beings.”
People are reduced to packages, their lives to distribution logistics.
During Bukele’s visit, Trump said, “We also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat … that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.”
Labeling citizens as monsters creates a class of people with diminished humanity and revocable rights, while the word “homegrown” suggests something that can be uprooted rather than a person who belongs.
Communications scholar Isabella Gonçalves has demonstrated that such rhetorical techniques reduce empathy and increase aggression toward marginalized groups.
Through linguistic manipulations, citizens become noncitizens, humans become monsters. Rights and citizenship transform from constitutional guarantees into conditional privileges based on behavior deemed acceptable by those in power. Citizenship becomes revocable, home becomes temporary, personhood becomes contingent.
The case of Abrego Garcia reveals the machinery behind the labels. First, the person is stripped of legal rights through a supposed error. Then, when the highest court orders his return, he is reclassified as a terrorist, a label that justifies continued separation from his family. Finally, when questioned, officials wash their hands of responsibility, claiming jurisdiction ends at the border.
This language corrupts our collective moral imagination. Cognitive scientists have discovered that dehumanizing language fundamentally alters how we perceive others, leading us to deny them complex mental capacities and ignore their ability to think and feel. When someone accepts bureaucratic terms for human displacement, they become desensitized, seeing figures instead of faces, cases instead of lives being upended.
But people are not errors to be corrected or ignored at convenience. Their stories cannot be labeled and filed away. Their identities cannot be edited to suit political agendas. Abrego Garcia is not an error, a terrorist or a foreign problem. He is a father, a worker and a community member with constitutional rights that have been violated.
In today’s political moment, when Easter messages transform immigrants into criminals and government officials dismiss human beings as administrative errors, Kunta Kinte’s struggle reminds us that when anyone allows racist, ethnocentric language to package people — whether through enslavement, deportation or bureaucratic erasure — everyone participates in a legacy of dehumanization.
But people are not objects, and their rights are not negotiable. We must reject the language of dehumanization because, in doing so, we protect the very essence of what it means to be human.
Stephanie R. Toliver is an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
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