You Can’t Drive, Mr Singh: How Trump’s Immigration Propaganda Racialises Sikh Americans
On September 9, the US Department of Homeland Security published an AI-generated image as part of the Trump administration’s campaign against undocumented immigration. Styled as a parody of the Transformers franchise, the image showed a DHS-branded version of Optimus Prime confronting a brown-skinned, bearded man wearing a head covering. The accompanying message read: “America for Americans. Get off our roads; you don’t know how to drive, Mr Singh.” The image also carried the slogan “Self-deport or find out” and encouraged people to report “illegal aliens on American roads.”
The choice of the name Singh and the appearance of the man in the image are what make the post particularly troubling for Sikh Americans. Singh is one of the most recognisable Sikh surnames, and the man depicted in the poster has several visual characteristics commonly associated with Sikh men, including a beard and head covering. The message therefore does not simply present an anonymous undocumented immigrant. It creates a recognisable ethnic and religious character and associates him with illegal immigration, poor driving and the instruction to leave America.
Sikh organisations immediately objected. The Sikh Coalition described the imagery as another example of Sikhs being targeted because of how they look, pointing to the fact that the community has experienced racial profiling for decades, particularly since the September 11 attacks. The Hindu American Foundation also described the post as racist and discriminatory and called for an investigation.
The administration can argue that its campaign is directed at undocumented drivers who have committed traffic offences or are considered unqualified to drive commercially. Road safety is a legitimate public concern, and immigration laws can be enforced. But there is an important difference between investigating an individual driver and constructing a racialised image of the dangerous immigrant driver. The DHS poster crosses that line by making “Mr Singh” the face of the problem.
This is especially significant because Sikh Americans have a long and complicated history of being racialised through their appearance. Academic research by sociologist Prema Kurien shows that Sikh identity in the United States has repeatedly been shaped by the racial categories imposed upon the community. Her research traces Sikh mobilisation from the early twentieth century through the post-9/11 period, when attacks against Sikh men wearing turbans and beards encouraged Sikh Americans to assert themselves as a distinct American religious and ethnic community.
The history is important because the visual language used by the Trump administration did not emerge in a vacuum. For Sikhs, a beard, turban or other form of Sikh religious appearance has repeatedly been interpreted by outsiders as evidence of foreignness or danger. Following September 11, Sikh men were frequently mistaken for Muslims and subjected to harassment and violence because of their appearance. Dawinder Sidhu and Neha Singh Gohil's Civil Rights in Wartime: The Post-9/11 Sikh Experience documents this history in detail, including profiling, employment discrimination, harassment, violence and the targeting of the Sikh turban.
That history makes the use of a Sikh-associated surname in an immigration enforcement campaign particularly consequential. The problem is not that the DHS post mentions an individual called Singh. It is that the name is combined with an image of a visibly South Asian man and with language about illegality and dangerous driving. The visual message depends upon viewers recognising the character as a particular kind of person. The stereotype works because “Singh” is being used as a cultural shorthand.
There is also a striking irony in the decision to associate Sikh identity with being a threat on America's roads. Sikh immigrants and their families have established a substantial presence in the US trucking industry, particularly in California and other parts of the American West. The exact number of Sikh truck drivers is not available from official government data, but community and industry estimates indicate that their presence is significant. The North American Punjabi Truckers Association has estimated that Sikh drivers make up about 40 per cent of truck driving on the West Coast and about 20 per cent nationally. The association has also said that there are no official figures, while the Sikh Coalition has estimated that approximately 150,000 Sikh drivers from India work in the United States.
These figures should therefore be treated as estimates rather than definitive measurements of the Sikh trucking workforce. But even without a precise national figure, there is abundant evidence that trucking has become an important part of the economic life of Sikh American communities. The Associated Press reported in 2025 that generations of Sikhs in California's Central Valley had entered the trucking industry and that the occupation has provided a route to economic independence for immigrant families. For many Sikh drivers, trucking has also offered a degree of freedom to practise their religion while working, including the ability to wear a turban and maintain uncut hair and beards.
This matters because the image of “Mr Singh” being told to get off America's roads reverses the reality of what Sikh truckers have contributed to those roads. These drivers are not simply passing through the American economy. They are part of the infrastructure that allows it to function. Trucks transport food, agricultural products, manufactured goods, medicine and countless other products across the country. The people driving them are essential to the movement of goods between farms, factories, warehouses, shops and consumers.
The trucking industry has also provided an important economic route for Punjabi immigrants. Trucking can allow workers to become owner-operators, establish their own businesses and eventually employ other drivers. For immigrant families, the occupation can provide a relatively accessible route to economic stability without requiring workers to abandon visible aspects of their religious identity. The AP spoke to Sikh community members who described trucking as an important source of financial support for families and education for their children.
The occupation has not, however, insulated Sikh drivers from discrimination. In fact, their experiences demonstrate how religious identity and employment can collide. The Sikh Coalition documented discrimination against four Sikh truck drivers employed or seeking employment with J.B. Hunt. Between 2008 and 2013, the company required three men to cut their hair for drug testing and asked another to remove his turban while providing a urine sample. The Sikh Coalition argued that neither requirement was necessary and represented religious discrimination. The matter eventually resulted in a settlement in 2016.
The significance of this history is easy to miss if Sikh truckers are discussed only in the context of immigration enforcement. These drivers have had to fight for the right to participate in the American trucking industry while retaining the religious practices that make them visibly Sikh. Their presence on American roads is therefore also a story about religious freedom, labour and immigrant integration.
The current controversy began in an atmosphere already charged by political arguments about immigrant truck drivers. In August 2025, India-born Sikh truck driver Harjinder Singh was involved in a fatal crash in Florida that killed three people. Singh was subsequently charged with manslaughter and vehicular homicide. Florida authorities said he had entered the country illegally, while California officials said federal authorities had previously indicated that he was legally authorised to work when the state issued his driver's licence. The case became a major political issue and was followed by increased hostility towards Sikh truckers.
There is no reason to minimise the seriousness of the crash. Three people died, and the allegations against Singh must be dealt with through the criminal justice system. But an individual driver's alleged conduct cannot logically establish that Sikh drivers as a group are dangerous. Nor can it establish that Indian immigrants generally are incapable of driving safely.
That distinction is crucial because political rhetoric has the capacity to transform an individual case into a stereotype. A fatal crash becomes evidence about immigrant drivers. The immigrant driver becomes a Sikh driver. The Sikh driver becomes “Mr Singh”. And “Mr Singh” becomes the visual representation of the undocumented immigrant whom the government wants the public to fear.
The DHS poster is powerful precisely because it collapses these distinctions. It does not explain the legal status of a particular driver. It does not identify the specific licensing rules that an individual has allegedly violated. Instead, it gives the audience a racialised character and a simple message: he is foreign, he is dangerous and he should leave.
That is how racial stereotypes work. They transform complicated questions about law, immigration status and individual behaviour into assumptions about what a particular type of person is like.
For Sikh Americans, this process has a particularly painful history. Before September 11, many Americans knew relatively little about Sikhism. After the attacks, the turban and beard became, for some Americans, visual markers of the people they associated with terrorism. Sikhs were attacked because perpetrators assumed they were Muslim or Arab. The murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi in Arizona on September 15, 2001, is among the most well-known examples of this post-9/11 violence.
The academic literature documents how this changed Sikh American political mobilisation. Kurien's research describes the post-9/11 backlash against Sikh men with turbans and beards and shows how it encouraged Sikh Americans to organise around a distinct religious identity and demand recognition of the discrimination they experienced. Sidhu and Gohil similarly document the legal and social consequences of post-9/11 profiling, including violence, employment discrimination and government detention.
The DHS image is different from the post-9/11 stereotype in one important respect. Sikhs are no longer being portrayed primarily as potential terrorists. Instead, a visibly Sikh man is being incorporated into the political stereotype of the undocumented immigrant. But the underlying mechanism is similar: a visible Sikh identity becomes a shorthand for something threatening.
The distinction between religion and race is also important here. Sikhism is a religion, but Sikh men who wear turbans and maintain uncut hair can be racialised by people who know nothing about the faith. They become identifiable as a social category before anyone knows their citizenship, immigration status, political views or personal history. The DHS poster demonstrates how that process can happen through government communication.
A person named Singh can be a US citizen. He can have been born in the United States. He can be the child or grandchild of Punjabi immigrants. He can have lived in America for decades. He can own a trucking company and employ other people. He can have a completely clean driving record. None of these facts are visible in the image.
What is visible is the stereotype.
This is why the phrase “America for Americans” is particularly revealing. It suggests that the people being depicted are somehow outside the category of Americans. Yet Sikh Americans have been part of American society for more than a century. Sikh migrants worked in agriculture and other industries in the early twentieth century, established communities and fought racial discrimination long before the contemporary immigration debate existed. Kurien's research demonstrates that Sikhs were among the earliest South Asian immigrant groups in the United States and have repeatedly had to negotiate American racial and citizenship categories.
The language of “America for Americans” therefore raises the question of who gets to count as American. If the answer is determined by appearance, surname or religion, then Sikh Americans will always be vulnerable to being treated as foreigners regardless of their citizenship.
The trucking industry makes this contradiction particularly visible. The American economy depends heavily on road transportation, yet many of the people doing this work remain socially marked as immigrants. Sikh truckers can be indispensable to supply chains while simultaneously being depicted as outsiders who do not belong on American roads.
The irony becomes even sharper when the administration's own immigration policies begin to affect legally authorised immigrant drivers. Reuters reported in February 2026 that the federal immigration crackdown was discouraging some immigrant truck drivers from working and that some drivers with valid work permits were limiting their travel because they feared detention. The report cited the Sikh Coalition's estimate of 150,000 Sikh drivers from India in the United States and described concerns within the trucking industry about the effect of immigration enforcement on the driver pool.
That is an economic problem as well as a civil-rights problem. If legally authorised drivers become afraid to travel because they believe they may be detained or questioned based on their immigration background or appearance, the consequences do not stop with the drivers themselves. They can affect companies, supply chains and the wider transportation system.
This does not mean that Sikh truckers should be exempt from licensing requirements or immigration enforcement. They should not. If someone is driving without the required qualifications, that person should be held accountable. If someone violates immigration law, the government can take action according to the law. The principle should be the same for everyone.
But equal enforcement is fundamentally different from racialised enforcement.
A government can say that unsafe drivers should be removed from the road without telling “Mr Singh” that he does not know how to drive. It can investigate individual cases without suggesting that a Sikh-associated identity is itself connected to dangerous driving. It can enforce immigration law without presenting a turbaned South Asian man as the embodiment of the illegal immigrant.
The distinction is not semantic. Government imagery helps determine how citizens see one another.
For Sikh Americans who have spent decades challenging stereotypes about their turbans, beards and identity, the message is especially troubling. The community has already experienced what happens when visible Sikh identity becomes a shortcut for assumptions about nationality, religion and danger. The DHS poster risks creating another version of the same problem, this time by connecting Sikh appearance and the surname Singh to illegal immigration and alleged incompetence on the road.
There is also a deeper contradiction in the administration's message. It is telling people who have helped build the American trucking industry that they do not belong on American roads. Sikh truckers have driven those roads for generations. They have transported goods, supported their families, established businesses and helped sustain an industry facing its own labour challenges. Their contribution does not disappear because one driver has been accused of wrongdoing.
The appropriate response to an unsafe driver is accountability. The appropriate response to an immigration violation is enforcement through law. Neither requires turning an entire religious and ethnic community into a caricature.
The problem with the DHS poster, therefore, is not simply that it is offensive to Sikhs. It is that it reveals how easily immigration enforcement can become racialised when government propaganda relies on familiar ethnic markers to identify its enemies. The brown face, the beard, the head covering and the name Singh are doing political work in that image. They tell the audience whom to imagine when they hear about the immigrant driver who supposedly does not belong.
Sikh Americans should not have to prove their Americanness every time a political campaign needs a visual representation of an outsider. They should not have to explain that Singh is a name, not an immigration status, that a turban is an article of faith, not evidence of illegality, and that driving ability is an individual matter, not a racial characteristic.
Most importantly, Sikh truckers should not be reduced to the stereotype of the dangerous immigrant when their actual story is one of labour, migration, entrepreneurship and economic contribution. The people behind those trucks are part of the American economy and, in many cases, part of America itself.
The Trump administration is entitled to argue for tougher immigration enforcement. It is entitled to prosecute people who break the law and to insist that commercial drivers meet safety standards. But a government that wants to enforce laws fairly should be careful about the images it uses to sell those policies. When it chooses a Sikh-associated name, a visibly Sikh-looking man and a truck to represent the immigrant who should leave America, it does more than make a political argument about immigration.
It tells Sikh Americans that their identity can be used as a symbol of foreignness.
And after a century of Sikh migration, labour and community-building in the United States, that is a message that deserves to be challenged.
Such portrayals signal to Sikh Americans that their community identity remains subject to being framed as intrinsically foreign. Following a century of Sikh immigration, labour contributions, and community establishment across the United States, this implicit message warrants active rejection.