U.S. President Donald Trump late Thursday announced an indefinite “permanent pause” on all immigration from what he called “Third World Countries,” a sweeping and deliberately vague decree that critics condemned as a racist, legally shaky bid to exclude migrants from the Global South.

The directive, delivered in a Thanksgiving-night Truth Social post laced with nativist fury, came one day after a fatal shooting in Washington, D.C., that killed National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and left another soldier fighting for his life.

The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan who once guarded U.S. forces at Kabul airport as part of a CIA-vetted elite unit, was swiftly weaponized by the administration to justify the broadest immigration clampdown of Trump’s second term.

“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover,” Trump wrote, vowing also to strip federal benefits from noncitizens, denaturalize those who “undermine domestic tranquility,” and deport any foreigner deemed a “public charge” or “non-compatible with Western civilization.”

Hours earlier, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had already frozen all Afghan immigration processing and ordered a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination” of green cards issued to nationals from 19 countries on the administration’s June travel-ban list—nations including Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Libya, and others overwhelmingly poor and nonwhite.

Legal scholars noted that “permanent pause” has no statutory meaning under the Immigration and Nationality Act and is almost certain to face swift court challenges.

Immigration attorney Abhishek Saxena described the phrasing as “an open-ended restriction with no stated end date,” designed to intimidate while preserving executive flexibility.

United Nations officials rebuked the move. “We expect the United States to honor its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention and ensure due process for asylum seekers,” deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said Friday.

Human rights spokesperson Jeremy Laurence added that migrants and refugees “are entitled to protection under international law.”

Advocates warned of cascading harm: indefinite family separations, heightened scrutiny of pending applications, and audits that could strip long-settled residents of status on tenuous grounds.

Roberto Forin of the Mixed Migration Centre called the ambiguity intentional, allowing the administration to “indiscriminately intimidate migrant communities” and treat the ban as a bargaining chip in foreign policy.

The announcement caps a year of relentless restriction: refugee admissions slashed to a historic low of 7,500 for fiscal 2026, a November memo ordering review of 233,000 Biden-era refugees, and travel bans disproportionately targeting Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

For millions of people, Trump’s Thanksgiving message was unambiguous: the United States, once a beacon for the huddled masses, is closing its gates—and doing so in language that many hear as an explicit rejection of the nonwhite, non-Western world.