Words Matter: When DHS turns stereotypes into punchlines, people pay the price
By Kareem Shora, Chief Operations Officer at Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC.
On September 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi was helping a landscaper plant flowers around his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, a tribute to the lives lost to terrorism three days earlier. Frank Silva Roque, fresh from ranting about immigrants at a bar, drove to that gas station and shot Sodhi five times with a .380 handgun, killing him. Roque wanted revenge for 9/11 and racially profiled Balbir as an Arab Muslim because of his turban, beard, and clothing. Roque then fired at the home of a local Afghan family, drove ten miles to another station, and shot at (and missed) a Lebanese American clerk. Afterward, he bragged at a bar that police were “investigating the murder of a turban-head down the street.”
This was the first post-9/11 widely reported fatal backlash hate crime. The victim was a Sikh-American. A few years later, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties launched national community engagement efforts on articles of faith, including posters on Sikh articles of faith. Their first principle: “show respect” and “do no harm.” I was part of the effort supporting that work. It wasn’t perfect, but it focused on unifying a nation still struggling to rebuild while holding onto its ideals of fairness, justice, accountability, and due process.
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Words were chosen carefully then, because people at DHS understood a federal agency doesn’t speak the way an angry man at a bar speaks. Government credibility isn’t a birthright, it’s earned sentence by sentence, and it can be spent recklessly in a single post.
This past week, on September 9, 2026, two days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, DHS published, then deleted, a different kind of message. It featured an AI-generated image of a Sikh man labeled “Mr. Singh,” confronted by a DHS-branded Optimus Prime, over the words “America for Americans. Get off our roads; you don’t know how to drive, Mr. Singh” and “Self-deport or find out.” “Singh” is one of the most common surnames among Sikh Americans. DHS later said the post referenced a specific driver facing charges. But whatever the intended target, the imagery reached for the same shorthand that got Balbir killed in 2001: a beard, a turban, a name standing in for a national security threat. When backlash came, DHS did not walk the post back. It called the criticism “nonsensical drivel” and “faux outrage.” That second choice of words matters as much as the first. Worse, it kept images of the post live for over 72-hours through thread replies.
The risk is measurable. Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC’s analysis of FBI hate-crime data found that Anti-Sikh hate crime incidents increased by 24.6% from 142 in 2024 to 177 in 2025. Twenty-five years apart, these are two very different ways for an agency to speak to the country it serves. One asked people to lead with respect and do no harm. The other reached for a stereotype as a punchline, then dismissed the people who recognized it. The poster came down. The pattern it revealed did not.
DHS should apologize and explain how this post was approved, who was responsible for the approval, reaffirm its own civil rights obligations, and commit that official communications will not use religious or ethnic identities to encourage racism and profiling. That is basic accountability and transparency policy and we call on the United State Congress to launch the appropriate oversight investigations into this pattern by DHS.
As a DHS veteran of more than 14 years, I know the department is capable of better. I also know that words from a federal agency are never just words. They tell the public who belongs, who is suspect, and who is to be treated as a threat. After Balbir Singh Sodhi, DHS should know exactly what those instructions can cost.
