“Toxic Empathy”: The Racist Logic Behind MAGA’s Attack on Compassion

How right-wing rhetoric weaponizes psychology to justify the brutality of ICE raids

In the early morning darkness of September 30, 2025, residents of a South Shore apartment building in Chicago woke to a sound more associated with war zones than American neighborhoods: Black Hawk helicopters hovering overhead. Federal agents rappelled from the aircraft onto the building’s roof, descended through stairwells using flashbang grenades, and swept through apartments with military precision. By dawn, 37 people had been arrested. Multiple U.S. citizens were detained for hours. Children, some reportedly naked, were removed from their homes.

This was not an isolated incident. It was part of Operation Midway Blitz, a $59 million federal immigration enforcement operation that deployed hundreds of agents across Chicago beginning in September 2025. Similar operations unfolded in Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis, involving tear gas, armed agents in tactical gear, and in multiple cases, fatal shootings. In Minneapolis, five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained alongside his father on January 20, 2026, despite having a pending asylum case and no deportation order. The kindergartener was transported to a Texas detention facility, where he soon fell ill.

The response from communities witnessing these operations has been predictable: horror, protest, attempts to shield neighbors from armed agents. What has been equally predictable—and deeply revealing—is how MAGA voices have dismissed these expressions of compassion. They have a term for caring about five-year-olds in detention, for protesting helicopter raids on apartment buildings, for objecting to armed agents taking people from their homes in the middle of the night: “toxic empathy.”

This phrase, popularized by conservative influencers and adopted across right-wing media, frames compassion itself as a threat to American safety. But the logic underlying “toxic empathy” rhetoric reveals something more disturbing than a philosophical debate about the limits of compassion. It exposes the racist foundations of contemporary anti-immigrant politics—a worldview that requires viewing certain people as fundamentally “other,” undeserving of the empathy that would otherwise be automatic, natural, human.

The Architecture of “Toxic Empathy”

The phrase has been building momentum in conservative circles for years, but it has found new urgency as ICE operations have intensified. Conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published a book in 2024 titled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Pastor Joe Rigney wrote The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. Marketing professor Gad Saad coined the term “suicidal empathy.” These aren’t fringe voices; they’re influential figures whose ideas circulate widely in MAGA media ecosystems.

The rhetoric reached perhaps its most prominent articulation when Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in February 2025 that “we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” specifically linking empathy to immigration. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declared that empathy is “destructive” for immigration policy. Pastor Josh McPherson put it even more starkly: “Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”

Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello, preaching at Washington National Cathedral in response to this discourse, identified its purpose clearly: “The arguments about toxic empathy are finding open ears because far-right-wing, white evangelicals are looking for a moral framework around which they can justify President Trump’s executive orders and policies.”

This is the architecture of “toxic empathy”: a pseudo-psychological framework that pathologizes compassion to provide moral cover for cruelty. It takes a term from legitimate psychological discourse—where toxic empathy might describe enabling self-destructive behavior—and weaponizes it against solidarity with vulnerable populations. The move is elegant in its cynicism: it borrows the language of mental health to suggest that caring about children like Liam Conejo Ramos, or protesting when helicopters descend on residential neighborhoods, represents not moral clarity but psychological dysfunction.

Liam Cenejo Ramos - Being Held in a Dentention Facility in Texas

The Reality of What We’re Asked Not to Feel

To understand what “toxic empathy” rhetoric asks us to accept as normal, we need to look clearly at what these operations actually involve.

Operation Midway Blitz began officially on September 8, 2025, though enforcement actions started earlier. The operation used the Great Lakes Naval Station as a staging area. Federal agents conducted raids at apartment buildings, often before dawn. The September 30 helicopter raid in South Shore wasn’t an anomaly—helicopters, both Black Hawks and lighter surveillance aircraft, became a regular presence over Chicago neighborhoods. Agents used chemical agents including tear gas and pepper balls on protesters. The operation resulted in over 800 arrests through early October and continued for months, at a cost of $59 million and counting.

A neighbor described the South Shore raid to WBEZ: “I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life, and the activity I saw—it was an invasion.” Another resident whose apartment door was broken down said he walked out hours later to find “broken doors littering the hallway—and his neighbors missing.” Federal agents had pulled people from their apartments, some naked, according to multiple witnesses. ProPublica’s investigation found little evidence to support the government’s claims that the building was controlled by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; of 21 detainees they were able to identify, virtually none had criminal records showing gang affiliation.

Los Angeles saw similar tactics beginning in late May 2025. Human Rights Watch documented hundreds of raids targeting places where Latino people work, shop, eat, and live. Federal agents arrested food vendors and their customers. They raided Home Depot parking lots where day laborers gathered. Agents wore tactical gear and carried military-style weapons, many wearing face masks and using unmarked vehicles. On June 6, agents stormed an Ambiance Apparel facility, detaining over 40 workers and forcing them into unmarked vans. The ACLU described it as an “oppressive and vile paramilitary operation.”

Portland has seen ongoing operations and protests since June 2025, with federal agents firing crowd control munitions from rooftops at demonstrators. Minneapolis’ Operation Metro Surge, which began December 4, 2025 and expanded dramatically on January 6, 2026, deployed 2,000 agents to the Twin Cities. On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old American woman. Two days later, in Portland, CBP agents shot two more people during a traffic stop.

And then there is Liam. Five years old. Detained after arriving home from preschool on January 20, 2026, in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. His family had a pending asylum case. There was no deportation order. His school principal, Jason Kuhlman, watched him in detention via photos shared by Rep. Joaquin Castro: “We got word that he was sick. That scares me. How is he being treated? What medical attention is he getting?” The principal’s message to those defending ICE was simple: “Open your eyes. Believe your eyes. Believe what you see. He’s not a criminal.”

This is what we are told represents “toxic empathy”: caring about a five-year-old in detention. Objecting to helicopter raids on residential buildings. Protesting when armed agents in tactical gear sweep through neighborhoods, detaining U.S. citizens along with their targets, separating families, operating with the force typically reserved for counterterrorism operations against entire apartment buildings filled with ordinary people.

The Racist Logic at the Core

Here is what makes “toxic empathy” rhetoric fundamentally racist: it only functions if you’ve already decided that certain people don’t deserve the moral consideration we would automatically extend to others.

Consider the logic. No one accuses Americans of “toxic empathy” when they feel concern for cancer patients, or veterans experiencing homelessness, or families affected by natural disasters. The empathy only becomes “toxic” when extended across the boundary of citizenship status—which in practice means across racial and national origin lines. The operations target predominantly Latino communities. The “characteristics” agents consider in deciding whom to detain explicitly include “how they look,” as Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino admitted when explaining enforcement in Chicago.

When Elon Musk warns of “civilizational suicide” due to empathy for immigrants, he’s echoing language from eugenic thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries who promoted the concept of “racial suicide”—the xenophobic fear that white populations would be replaced by other racialized groups with higher birth rates. This isn’t subtle. Musk is one of the most prominent voices in American public life, and he’s openly linking empathy for immigrants to racial replacement anxiety, broadcast to millions through the country’s most popular podcast.

The selective condemnation of empathy reveals who counts as fully human in this framework. Imagine if ICE conducted dawn raids with helicopters in predominantly white, affluent suburbs, detaining parents in front of their children based on expired visas. Imagine if Irish or Australian nationals overstaying tourist visas faced the same treatment as Venezuelan or Mexican families. Would protesters opposing such operations be dismissed as suffering from “toxic empathy”? Or would there be immediate national outcry about due process, proportionality, and human dignity?

The differential application of the “toxic empathy” framework is the tell. It’s deployed specifically against solidarity with people who are marked as other through race, ethnicity, language, national origin. It trains people to suppress their moral instincts when those instincts would lead to questioning enforcement actions against brown-skinned immigrants.

What Empathy Actually Threatens

So why this coordinated attack on empathy? What does compassion for immigrants actually threaten?

The answer becomes clear when you look at what happened after the South Shore raid. Neighbors organized. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights mobilized to identify detainees. Legal advocates filed challenges. Thousands protested. Schools created “magic school bus” systems to protect children. Community members set up alert systems, blowing whistles when federal agents appeared. This is what empathy looks like when it moves beyond feeling into action: solidarity that can actually impede the smooth operation of the deportation machine.

The same pattern emerged in Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis. When people show up outside ICE facilities holding vigils for five-year-old Liam, when they march by the tens of thousands demanding accountability after Renée Good’s killing, when they use their bodies to slow federal vehicles, they’re not just expressing feelings. They’re building collective power that could translate into political pressure, legal victories, sanctuary policies, or other forms of resistance. They’re refusing to treat their neighbors as disposable.

This is what the “toxic empathy” rhetoric seeks to prevent. It’s not actually about the psychology of empathy. It’s about isolating people, breaking bonds of solidarity, making resistance seem not just difficult but psychologically suspect. If caring about Liam in detention makes you “toxic,” if protesting helicopter raids means you’re suffering from empathetic dysfunction, then maybe you should doubt your own moral instincts. Maybe you should stay home, stay quiet, let the agents do their work.

Systems of oppression have always required breaking these bonds. Slave owners separated families specifically to prevent collective resistance. Jim Crow laws forbade certain forms of interracial association to maintain racial hierarchy. Immigration enforcement relies on fear to isolate undocumented people, making them afraid to organize, speak out, or build coalitions. The “toxic empathy” rhetoric extends this isolation by discouraging citizens from standing with immigrants, pathologizing the solidarity that could challenge enforcement operations.

Who Pays the Price

The human costs of these operations extend far beyond arrest numbers. Silverio Villegas-González was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a traffic stop in Franklin Park, Illinois, on September 13, 2025. In Chicago Mirimar Martinez was shot five times by Border Patrol before being arrested; a judge later dismissed charges against her. Renée Good, attempting to observe ICE operations, was shot and killed. Alex Pretti, a nurse, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis.

In detention, conditions are often dangerous. An internal ICE inspection found the rapidly constructed Camp East Montana facility at Fort Bliss military base failed to meet at least 60 detention standards. Civil rights groups documented toilets overflowing into sleeping areas, denial of medication and adequate food, and reports of sexual abuse. In 2025 alone, 32 people died in immigration detention. In just the first three weeks of 2026, six more people died in ICE custody. Liam’s mother told reporters he was getting sick because the food was poor quality. He had stomach pain, vomiting, and fever.

Four U.S. citizen children in Chicago were separated from their undocumented parents and detained for hours during the South Shore raid before being released. Multiple other U.S. citizens across various operations were detained, sometimes for days. Dayanne Figueroa, a U.S. citizen recovering from kidney surgeries, was pulled from her SUV in Chicago and taken to the Broadview ICE facility. She testified to Congress that she “begged for help” but was ignored and “thrown into a filthy jail cell” until blood in her urine prompted medical attention.

ICE data shows that more than 75% of people booked into custody in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal conviction beyond immigration or traffic-related offenses. The narrative that these operations target “the worst of the worst”—repeated constantly by DHS officials—doesn’t match the reality of who gets swept up. Instead, operations have resulted in workplace raids at Home Depot parking lots where day laborers gather, arrests of food vendors and their customers, detention of children going to school, separation of families who had been living peacefully in American communities for years or decades.

This is the reality that “toxic empathy” rhetoric asks us to accept as necessary, rational, proper. This is what we’re told we shouldn’t feel distressed about. When we do feel distressed—when principals become emotional about kindergarteners in detention, when neighbors organize to protect families, when thousands march demanding accountability—we’re told our empathy has become toxic, that we’re being manipulated by progressive exploitation of Christian compassion, that we’re committing civilizational suicide.

Refusing the Framework

There is a reason this rhetoric has intensified precisely as enforcement operations have become more brutal, more visible, more difficult to defend on the merits. When helicopters descend on residential neighborhoods, when five-year-olds end up sick in detention facilities, when people are shot while observing federal agents or pulled naked from their beds in midnight raids—these operations strain the limits of what can be publicly justified as necessary law enforcement.

So a new justification is required. If the operations themselves can’t be defended as proportionate or humane, then the problem must lie with those who object. Their empathy must be the dysfunction. Their compassion must be the threat. This rhetorical move allows the cruelty to continue while preemptively discrediting opposition as psychologically compromised.

But calling something “toxic empathy” doesn’t make it so. What MAGA voices label as toxic is actually the capacity to recognize someone like Liam as deserving the same concern we would extend to any five-year-old. What they pathologize as dysfunction is actually the moral clarity to see helicopter raids on apartment buildings as disproportionate regardless of the legal status of the targets. What they dismiss as suicidal civilizational empathy is actually the insistence that people who have built lives in American communities—who work, pay taxes, have families, contribute to their neighborhoods—shouldn’t be treated as enemy combatants subject to paramilitary operations.

The racist logic underlying “toxic empathy” rhetoric is this: it requires accepting that certain people are so fundamentally other that the normal human response to their suffering—the response that would be automatic if the victims were marked as “our own”—becomes suspect when extended to them.

It demands we train ourselves out of compassion for people who look different, speak different languages, come from different places. It teaches that the boundary of citizenship status should override every other consideration, including basic human dignity, family bonds, community ties, or the wellbeing of children.

This is racism operating through the sanitized language of psychological frameworks and law enforcement necessity. It’s the same pattern that has justified racial oppression throughout American history: construct a threatening other, pathologize empathy for them, frame brutal enforcement as necessary protection, dismiss opposition as naive or dangerous. The specific mechanisms change—Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, “welfare queens,” “superpredators,” and now “toxic empathy”—but the underlying logic remains constant.

So when someone tells you that your distress at seeing Liam in detention represents toxic empathy, understand what they’re actually saying. They’re telling you to care less, feel less, notice less. They’re asking you to accept that certain people’s humanity is conditional on their legal status. They’re demanding you suppress the moral intuition that tells you something is profoundly wrong about armed agents taking parents from their children, about five-year-olds getting sick in detention, about helicopters descending on residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night.

Refuse that framework. Trust your empathy. The problem isn’t that people feel compassion for immigrants facing brutal enforcement; the problem is an enforcement system that operates with brutality. The problem isn’t that protesters gather outside ICE facilities demanding the release of five-year-olds; the problem is that five-year-olds are being detained in the first place. The problem isn’t “toxic empathy”; the problem is a politics that requires suppressing empathy to maintain racial hierarchies.

The capacity to feel distress at human suffering, regardless of the sufferer’s legal status or national origin, isn’t a psychological dysfunction. It’s the foundation of a multiracial democracy. When that capacity moves from private feeling into public action—when it becomes solidarity, resistance, collective power—it threatens systems that depend on isolation and othering. Which is exactly why MAGA voices are so desperate to pathologize it.

History will record how we responded in this moment. Whether we allowed rhetoric about “toxic empathy” to numb us to cruelty, or whether we insisted that everyone’s humanity matters—five-year-olds and their parents, people who fled violence and people who overstayed visas, neighbors who’ve lived here for decades and asylum seekers who arrived last month. The stubborn insistence that everyone deserves to be treated with basic human dignity, regardless of where they were born or what papers they carry, isn’t toxic. It’s the very thing that makes change possible.