Key Takeaways
- Anti-Sikh and anti-South Asian hate are spiking online and manifesting in real-world violence. During the week Sikh truck driver Gurvinder Singh was stabbed 17 times at a Wyoming rest stop, slurs against the community on fringe platforms rose 66 percent in just four days. This builds on years of escalating hate and violence toward South Asians in the United States.
- The Trump Administration is fueling this hate. After a deadly 2025 crash involving a Sikh truck driver, federal agencies singled out Sikhs in the trucking industry with visa pauses, tighter English requirements, and an ICE “Commercial Driver’s License fraud tipline.”
- Days before the stabbing of Gurvinder Singh, DHS posted an image telling “Mr. Singh” to “self-deport or find out.” The Department of Education separately posted a reference to a viral, racist post targeting South Asian students at UT Austin.
Four days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, a Sikh man named Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed at his Mesa, Arizona, gas station. Sodhi’s killing was the first of what would become a wave of reactionary violence that primarily targeted Muslim and South Asian Americans. Twenty-five years later, on September 13th, 2026, a Sikh truck driver named Gurvinder Singh was stabbed 17 times at a remote rest stop in Wyoming. This attack comes as anti-South Asian and anti-Sikh rhetoric is being pushed by the far right and the Trump Administration as a part of their larger crusade against immigration.
Hateful speech targeting South Asians, including Sikhs, has been growing for years. In May 2024, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) found a 122 percent increase in slurs online directed at South Asians on 4chan, and a 261 percent increase on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, between January 2023 and 2024.
Approximately 750,000 Sikhs live in the U.S. and about 150,000 work in the trucking industry. According to the North American Punjabi Trucking Association (NAPTA), 40% of all truck drivers on the West Coast are Sikh. Last year, an undocumented but properly licensed Sikh driver named Harjinder Singh made an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike that caused the death of three people. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Singh had entered the U.S. illegally in 2018, but California officials say federal authorities had told them he had a legal work permit when the state issued him a commercial driver’s license (CDL).
As a result of this tragic accident, Sikhs and South Asians in the trucking industry have been placed under increased scrutiny. Two weeks after the crash, Secretary of State Marco Rubio paused work visas for individuals looking to become commercial truck drivers. The Trump Administration also moved to tighten the language requirements for commercial drivers because many foreign-born truck drivers have limited English skills but years of truck-driving experience. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also launched a “CDL fraud tipline,” encouraging people to report individuals they suspect obtained their CDLs fraudulently.
Following the attack on Gurvinder Singh, GPAHE found that anti-Sikh and anti-South Asian rhetoric on fringe platforms surged, with mentions of slurs growing by 66 percent from September 11 to September 15 on 4chan, 8kun, Gab, Kiwi Farms, Rumble, Scored, Telegram, and Truth Social, with 91 percent, a vast majority, of these vile comments coming from 4chan. It is also possible the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack contributed to this spike. Immediately after the terrorist attack, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice documented a sharp increase in hate crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians, and those perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin. Balbir Singh Sodhi was one casualty of this hatred.Twenty-five years later, racist and anti-Muslim sentiment remains prevalent.
Some examples of hateful posts targeting South Asians and Sikhs include violent rhetoric, dehumanizing language, and references to South Asians driving trucks:
- “Only a sulfuric acid bath could clean a jeet.”
- “you are always mocked you shit eating pajeet”
- “The whole world hates you pajeet roaches”
- “There’s nothing wrong with a white man being a delivery driver in America. There’s a lot wrong with some greasy little dothead travelling thousands of miles to be a delivery driver in America.”
- “Did I stutter? I said th-ACK! *gets run over by a paki in a delivery truck*”
In April 2026, a report by the World Sikh Organization of Canada found that 80 percent of respondents believed discrimination and hate against Sikhs had increased in the past five years. An analysis by the Sikh Coalition of FBI hate crime data from 2025 found that hate crimes against Sikhs saw an overall increase of 25% from the prior year. In addition, the Sikh Coalition found that hate crimes against Sikhs peaked in September 2025, the month after the truck accident in Florida, with 26 incidents.
A now-deleted post by the Department of Homeland Security targeting South Asians, and more specifically, Sikhs, threatening them to “self-deport or find out.” (Source: X).
There is little doubt that the Trump Administration is contributing to the tidal wave of hatred directed at the Sikh community. On September 10, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security X account posted a racist image of a Transformers character with a brown man wearing a headscarf, captioned “self-deport or find out.” The AI-generated poster also included the white nationalist slogan “America for Americans” and “Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.” Singh is a common Sikh last name, and both the victim of the stabbing attack and the driver that caused the Florida accident have that name.
DHS’ post has since been deleted.
In the aftermath of the stabbing, Harsimran Singh, CEO of Gillson Trucking, told AP that anti-Sikh sentiment has been “especially severe” on truck-driving forums, recounting that “I never felt this kind of hate before.” Raman Singh Dhillon, chief executive of NAPTA, said many drivers were now afraid of becoming targets, “Sikh drivers are being harassed at truck stops. In some cases, even local law enforcement has been unresponsive.”
The Trump Administration and the far right have played a role in the hate toward the South Asian community more broadly as well. In early September, a post showing students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) celebrating a football win in the student section went viral because there were many students who appeared to be South Asian. The picture was quickly promoted by far-right influencers, including MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec, who wrote on X, “I’ve never seen Texas Republicans fight so hard as I have seen them fight to replace the population of the State of Texas with foreigners.”
The photo of the student section at a University of Texas at Austin football game that went viral over the presence of South Asian students. (Source: X)
This post had real-world consequences for those unlucky enough to be in the photo. According to The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at UT Austin, one of the students in the picture, a lifelong Austin resident, was described as “not American” in a viral post on X. The comments were disturbing. She told the paper, “Honestly, it’s just really disheartening to see and hear being a first-generation in America. There’s this underlying fear or this underlying sense of not belonging, and to see it so explicitly written out, it doesn’t feel good.”
The Trump Administration decided to pile on. The U.S. Department of Education posted a photo of UT Austin’s football field with “MAKE COLLEGE FOOTBALL GREAT AGAIN” and “MAKE EDUCATION GREAT AGAIN” written over the image. The post is a clear reference to the photo of the student section and places yet another target on the backs of South Asians in the United States.
The photo posted by the U.S. Department of Education of a University of Texas at Austin football game following the earlier controversy over the photo of the student section. (Source: X)
For many South Asians, it feels like very little – if anything – has changed in the 25 years since Sodhi’s murder. It seems they’re under a greater threat now than ever before. The only difference is that the people targeting them aren’t just individuals or obscure white supremacist groups — it’s the federal government. And the South Asian community is now paying the very real consequences of that rhetoric.
