Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh!

I am writing to you directly because the events of the last seven days require us to speak with one another honestly, as a sangat, before the noise of the news cycle moves on.

In the past week, prominent voices in American media and politics—including the Vice President and State Department—have used their platforms to direct hate at the Sikh community.

Tucker Carlson dedicated two broadcasts to portraying Sikhs as invaders taking jobs and lives: first in the U.S. trucking industry, then in connection with the tragic murder of Henry Nowak in the United Kingdom. He used images of keshdhari, dastaar-wearing Sikh men to drive his framing, choosing the visual markers of our faith specifically to alarm his audience. Nick Fuentes seized on the same UK tragedy as evidence that immigration is a threat to national identity.

Vice President JD Vance invoked the same case, situating it within his ideology of national conservatism and decrying a “mass invasion of migrants.” The official account of the State Department, in commentary on the law enforcement response to the same case, described what it called “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing” as evidence of “civilizational decline” in “the West.”

We expect right wing influencers like Carlson and Fuentes who shape online dialogue to go down this road. It should chill every Sikh, however, that the Vice President and State Department are following suit. These are not the views of the fringe—they are in the mainstream. 

So what are we to make of it?

First: These are not attacks of “mistaken identity.” The messages shared over the past week have been specific to Sikh immigration, to Sikhs in the trucking industry, and to Sikh articles of faith. We are not collateral damage in the targeting of someone else—we are the target.

Second: Community condemnation, while important, has not changed the views of those attacking us. The Akal Takht, alongside gurdwaras and Sikh organizations in the UK, have unequivocally condemned the murder of Henry Nowak. And still, the attacks against our sangat continue. This is because the attacks were never about a specific act: They are about us.

And finally: All of this must be placed in a wider frame. The targeting of our community does not exist in isolation. It belongs to a now-familiar pattern of rhetoric that has been deployed against other religious and immigrant communities in this country, and now lands on us.

  • In 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Within two years, that call became federal policy in his first administration; that policy has become more expansive, targeting even more people, under his current administration.
  • In 2017, when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” the Great Replacement theory—a conspiracy that immigrants and people of color are being deliberately imported by Jewish elites to displace white Americans—moved from message boards into the political mainstream. Just five years later, a gunman who killed ten Black Americans in a Buffalo grocery store cited this falsehood as his motivation.
  • In 2023, Donald Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
  • In 2024, Donald Trump and JD Vance spread the fabricated claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats and dogs” of their neighbors. Within days, bomb threats forced the closure of Springfield’s schools, hospitals, and city buildings. Haitian families were afraid to leave their homes. Referring to these claims later, JD Vance defended his right to “create stories”—essentially admitting to the falsehood.
  • In 2025, federal immigration enforcement was deployed against lawfully present residents and U.S. citizens in operations across multiple cities, with documented cases of mistaken arrest, prolonged and abusive detention, and deportation of people with valid legal status. The phrase “mass deportation” became routine in public discourse. Members of our own sangats, including the elderly and the sick, were among those targeted.

This is the architecture into which the attacks on our community now fit. Identify a religious or ethnic minority, attach a moral panic to its presence, and use the panic to justify policies that strip rights, livelihoods, and safety. We are in these crosshairs. 

Our task is not to deny it. It is to name it, prepare for it, and refuse to yield to it. What this asks of us, as a community, is twofold.

First, we must strengthen our identity from within. This is the moment to deepen what makes us Sikh—to know our history, to carry our articles of faith with confidence, to protect our Gurdwara Sahibs, and to ground our young people in who we are before someone else tells them who they are. Our identity is not a vulnerability to manage. It is the source of our strength, just as it has been for five centuries. The Sikh Coalition is convening a virtual Panthic town hall this  weekend on kirpan rights, attended by sangat members from across the country and around the world. We are connecting with gurdwaras in every region. In the coming weeks, we will expand our focus to gurdwara safety. The work of strengthening our community from the inside has never been more urgent.

Second, we must continue to build bridges. Ours is not the only community under threat from this kind of harmful rhetoric and policy, which means that we must make common cause with others who are standing against hate and bigotry. An attack on Sikhs is an attack on the broader promise of religious freedom that protects every American of faith. When the right to wear a kirpan is challenged, every religious freedom in America is challenged. When the right of Sikhs to seek asylum is questioned, the asylum claims of every persecuted minority become more fragile. When Sikh immigrants are framed as invaders, the same framing—and the same policies—extend to every immigrant community. Our defense is connected to theirs, which means we must refuse to be divided. It isn’t just the moral thing to do, but the strategic one: After all, poll after poll continues to show that the American public does not support white nationalism or national conservatism, but instead views immigration as a benefit to this country and immigrants as an essential part of the American story.

Our faith asks us to be tyar bar tyar, or ready upon ready. The Gurus did not give us this discipline as an abstraction. They gave it to us for moments like this one so we do not cower or yield. We will organize. We will educate. We will sue when we must, and reconcile when we can. We will name what is happening in plain and unequivocal terms. And we will refuse to let our community be reduced to the caricature that others are constructing of us.

The Sikh Coalition is here. Reach out when you need us—for legal help, for accommodation support, for community resources, and for whatever else this moment requires. 

In Chardi Kala,
Harman Singh