Ann Coulter Melts Down as Trump Softens on Farmworker ‘Amnesty’: ‘We Didn’t Kill Enough Indians’

Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Ann Coulter’s opinion of President Donald Trump has flipped back and forth over the years, usually in connection to his immigration policies; if she’s publicly criticizing him, it’s generally because she thinks he’s being too soft on the issue. Recent reports that the president was willing to back off the hardline enforcement she favors sparked a torrent of angry tweets — including one that was locked down by X for lamenting that “we didn’t kill enough Indians.”

Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has revoked Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, cheered the opening of a controversial detention center in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” and directed a crackdown by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, often masked and in plainclothes, detaining migrants — including many who were detained at work or at court for their required hearings and lack any sort of serious or violent criminal history.

Some employers have complained that they are having trouble hiring enough people with their immigrant employees — even those who had legal work permits — being arrested and deported by ICE, or being too scared to come to work. Sectors like agriculture, hospitality, construction, and manufacturing have been especially vocal in expressing concerns, and the Trump administration has wrestled with how to balance the competing interests of his supporters in the business community and his campaign promise of mass deportations.

A few weeks ago, it was reported that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins had engaged in “intensive lobbying” urging Trump to roll back his crackdown, and the president wrote a post on Truth Social that said the “great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” and indicated a willingness to soften enforcement activities, while vowing to still “get the CRIMINALS OUT.”

Needless to say, looking like he was caving on immigration policy did not go over well with many of Trump’s MAGA supporters. Coulter, who had cheered news reports earlier this year that the president wanted to send U.S. citizens to a notorious El Salvadoran prison, was predictably enraged by this development.

Over the past few days, she wrote dozens of X posts — and shared many dozens more from other immigration hardliners — lambasting Trump for supporting “amnesty” and thereby committing a “betrayal” of his MAGA voters.

The suggestion of a more lenient immigration policy for agriculture especially drew Coulter’s ire, and she repeatedly attacked Rollins by name, called for her to be fired, and showed support for harsh actions against farmers, like in the below tweet that argued farmers shouldn’t just “NOT get special treatment, they should be deported along with their illegal serfs.”

Coulter shared that post with a heart emoji.

Below are several additional posts from Coulter on the topics of immigration, Trump, or Rollins:

Coulter took a break from ranting about immigrants to attack Native Americans, a group she has criticized in the past as being uncivilized and benefiting from the arrival of European settlers. In a July 5 X post, she responded to a video clip of then Vice President Kamala Harris talking about what problems European explorers “ushered in” by writing “Also buildings.”

(This is not accurate. Various Native American tribes were constructing homes, storage buildings, meeting or community facilities and other structures for centuries before the Europeans came.)

On July 6, Coulter shared a video of a Native American college professor at a socialism conference urging her audience to support “decolonization” and “liberation struggles” of “indigenous” people, “to “seek a world of justice, equality, and peace,” and “seek to dismantle the United States,” which she also referred to as a “settler regime.” Coulter’s caption to the tweet was interpreted by many as a call for genocide.

“We didn’t kill enough Indians,” wrote Coulter.

According to the Holocaust Museum Houston, historians have estimated that over 10 million Native Americans were living on this continent when European settlers first arrived, but by 1900 that number had dwindled to under 300,000 after multiple wars, violence against native populations encouraged by government officials, deliberate efforts to spread infectious epidemic diseases like smallpox, and forced relocations like the Trail of Tears.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. strongly condemned Coulter’s tweet as “beyond abhorrent” in a statement he posted on Facebook.

Coulter’s post was “dangerous hate speech designed to inflict damage on a marginalized community and designed arose support in the deepest darkest gutters of social media” that necessitated a sharp response, wrote Hoskin, who heads the largest tribe in the U.S.

“Coulter’s statement, on its face,” he continued, “is a despicable rhetorical shot trained on the First Peoples of this continent, designed to dehumanize and diminish us and our ancestors and puts us at risk of further injury. We have faced enough of that since this country’s founding. Such rhetoric has aided and abetted the destruction of tribes, their life ways, languages and cultures, the violation of treaty rights, violence, oppression, suppression and dispossession. It should not be lost on any of us that Coulter’s lament that ‘we didn’t kill enough Indians’ takes place against the backdrop of our relatively low average life expectancies, high suicide rates and the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous people, just to name a few aspects of our continuing struggle.”

Hoskin lamented the virality of Coulter’s comment, noting that she had millions of followers and her post had been shared over 1.4 million times (as of Monday afternoon, that number was now over 10.6 million), and voiced his “deep concern” that in an era of the country seeming to be “on the verge of political violence,” her post “implicitly encourages it.”

“What Ann Coulter said is heartless, vicious and should be repudiated by people of good faith regardless of political philosophy or party,” he concluded. “Some things are simply wrong and we cannot validate it through our silence. I will not and cannot chase every hateful social media comment aimed at Native Americans. But, at a moment when I remain optimistic that people of good will across parties, faiths, philosophies, regions, races, political status can work to unify the country, denouncing Ann Coulter’s regret that we ‘did not kill enough Indians’ is surely the right thing to do. Please join me.”

After hours of backlash and complaints, X put a content restriction on Coulter’s post, marking it as “Visibility limited” because “this Post may violate X’s rules against Violent Speech.”

Screenshot via X.

Under these restrictions, X hides the text of the post behind a warning label and the tweet can no longer be shared by other users.

So far, Coulter does not appear to have responded to the restriction on her tweet or critical responses to it.