How Trump acolytes seized on UK teen’s killing to push anti-immigration agenda

Tributes to Henry Nowak in Southampton on Saturday.

Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA Tributes to Henry Nowak in Southampton on Saturday.

Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA How Trump acolytes seized on UK teen’s killing to push anti-immigration agenda Senior administration officials jump on death of Henry Nowak – and statements echo language of the far right O ver a breathtaking few days that spanned Saturday’s 82nd anniversary of D-day, senior Trump administration officials have trampled over diplomatic protocol to tear into Europe’s immigration and anti-racism policies and argue that such actions could end western civilization.

From the United States, Vice-President JD Vance and other administration officials jumped on a controversial murder case in Britain to accuse Keir Starmer’s government of lacking the Trump administration’s “political will and leadership” to stop mass migration and defend national sovereignty.

From an American cemetery in Normandy, Pete Hegseth , the defense secretary, suggested that the freedom the allies had fought for in 1944 risked being upended by a new “invasion” of migrants threatening the European continent.

These extraordinary interventions in the policy decisions of allied countries were sparked by a growing controversy in Britain over the killing of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old white student stabbed by a Sikh man wielding a ceremonial dagger and then mistakenly arrested in his dying moments because police thought he was the perpetrator, not the victim, of a crime.

Under the usual rules of international engagement, the case would most likely have prompted no official US reaction at all. Instead, Nowak has become a rallying cry for the international far right. Statements from Vance and the US state department echoed the arguments – and the language – of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party that it is an illustration of multiculturalism and political correctness gone mad.

“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit,” Vance wrote on X , even as far-right activists and Reform leaders were clashing with police in Southampton, the university city on the south coast where Nowak studied and died.

“Each time a life like his is lost,” Vance added, “the proper response – the only response – is righteous anger.” Those words closely tracked an earlier statement from Farage that said: “We should respond to this with pure, cold rage.” Pete Hegseth at the D-day commemoration in Colleville-sur-Mer on Saturday.

Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, refrained from criticizing Vance directly. But a statement from his office issued in the wake of his X post referred to unnamed people “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets”. Starmer and other British politicians have also accused Farage of going against the wishes of Nowak’s family who said they did not want Henry’s death to be used “to create further division, hatred, or tension”.

That division erupted in Britain last week as Nowak’s killer, Vickrum Digwa, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 21 years. Police bodycam footage released as the trial ended showed Nowak telling police he had been stabbed and one of the officers replying: “I don’t think you have, mate.” According to trial evidence, the police were misled by an emergency call from Digwa’s brother that said Nowak had hurled racial abuse at Digwa and knocked his turban off. The judge in the case rejected these claims and said Digwa had brought shame upon his family and his religion.

Hampshire police have apologized, and the episode is being investigated by an independent police watchdog. But conservative voices have criticized the police’s anti-racism guidelines, suggesting that they contributed to the officers’ inclination to believe Digwa’s story even when a man lay on the ground dying.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council is reviewing those guidelines. Still, publications from the Times to the Wall Street Journal – both owned by Rupert Murdoch – have been quick to blame Nowak’s death on “ DEI indoctrination ” or even to call it a “ woke murder ”.

The US state department echoed these criticisms in an unusual statement that referred to “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing” – the implication being that the British police discriminate against white people even though history and official reports demonstrate the diametric opposite.

The Trump administration and the far right in Britain have both pushed the argument further by seeing Nowak’s murder as a direct consequence of decades of immigration policies that have brought different races and cultures into Britain and other European countries and, in their view, threatened their very existence.

“[Nowak] should still be alive today,” Vance claimed, “and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the west and the people who love it.” Hegseth, in his D-day speech at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, suggested that the bravery of the allied forces who fought to save Europe in 1944 now risked being upended.

“Sadly, today,” he said in a speech that was widely denounced as soon as he delivered it, “different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies … When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late?” Experts who study far-right movements say it has become increasingly common for activists on opposite sides of the Atlantic to echo each other’s rhetoric as they seek to paint liberal democracy as a decadent or dying ideology and accuse immigrants, in particular, of hastening the collapse of western societies.

“International networking has become a central strategy of the radical right, who have recognized that their fight against the hegemony of the ‘global liberal elites’ has to be conducted globally,” Thomas Greven of the Free University of Berlin has written .

The Trump administration has not consistently put itself at the forefront of this international movement as it balances its ideological leanings with America’s strategic commitments and security agreements with longstanding allies.

Still, Trump owed his rapid political rise to the presidency more than a decade to his willingness to break political taboos and blame immigrants for bringing rape, murder and many other ills to the United States. Guests at his second inauguration in January 2025 included Farage, members of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and rightwing heads of state including Javier Milei of Argentina and Giorgia Meloni of Italy.

That guest list was a reflection, in part, of the influence of far-right and white nationalist ideologies that all make a similar nativist argument: that immigration and liberal efforts to combat racism and other entrenched forms of discrimination are bringing the United States and the rest of the west to its knees. Hegseth wrote a book in 2022, Battle for the American Mind , in which he argued that public education in the United States was indoctrinating students to hate America and only a return to Christian education could save them.

Trump’s chief domestic policy adviser and the chief architect of his sweeping efforts to round up and deport immigrants, Stephen Miller, is similarly steeped in far-right ideology. A batch of emails from the 2010s leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center showed him to be an enthusiastic reader of The Camp of the Saints, a notorious French novel from the 1970s that imagines Asians overrunning Europe, describes its Indian antagonist as a “turd-eater”, and depicts a graphic rape of a white woman by a brown-skinned man.

Since the 2025 inauguration, it has often been Vance taking the lead in deepening the administration’s ties to the international far right and undermining the legitimacy of mainstream western governments.

In his Munich speech, the vice-president described liberal western governments as a “ threat from within ” and accused them of prosecuting rightwing activists for what he called “thought crimes”, an Orwellian term also used by Farage.

As an example, he cited Adam Smith-Connor, a British physiotherapist and anti-abortion activist arrested in Bournemouth in 2022 after he refused to leave a safe zone established outside an abortion clinic. He said the case marked “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” including freedom of speech.

On the same trip, Vance met the AFD leader Alice Weidel. Earlier this year, he visited Hungary and, in another stark departure from political norms, campaigned as a foreign leader on behalf of Viktor Orbán’s ultimately unsuccessful re-election bid.

The intervention in the Nowak case is unusual because of the sharpness of the official rhetoric directed towards a country often regarded as the United States’s closest foreign ally. That may be a sign of the Trump administration’s preference for a Reform victory at the next general election, or simply a feeling that the Nowak case is too good a cause to ignore. The White House directed a request for comment to the state department statement.

“Henry Nowak’s murder … should be a rallying cry for the right to achieve real results against the demographic suicide, ideological suicide, and moral suicide in which Britain, Europe, and, to some extent, the United States, are currently engaged,” one outspoken American rightwinger, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, wrote last week.

The Trump administration appears to have heeded his advice.

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