However, President Trump is not alone in targeting people with mental illness in the aftermath of gun violence instead of focusing on access to guns. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, among others, have done the same. If they’re successful, it will be another hard hit against marginalized communities during an administration when they are already under attack.

The American legal landscape is a complex web of laws that subject mentally ill people and those experiencing acute crisis or suicidality to surveillance and restrictions of their rights, which most notably includes the right of states to involuntarily commit a person with mental illness or to mandate outpatient treatment. Undergirding this legal framework is the presumption that people with mental illness are prone to violence (whether against themselves or others).

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This is sanism: The system of institutionalized oppression that systematically disadvantages people perceived or determined to be mentally ill, while granting privileges to those considered sane.

The legal link between violence and mental illness is so strong that the United States often uses institutionalization as part of the broader carceral system. Among the most glaring examples of this are the insanity defense, people who are deemed incompetent to stand trial, and sex offenders who are confined to mental institutions even after the completion of their criminal sentence.

Technically, people charged under these laws are not sent to prison. However, institutionalization functions as a form of medical incarceration; patients are not free to come and go, and are often confined in hospitals for a longer period than they would have been confined to jail or prison. In fact, the population of forensic patients in state psychiatric hospitals has grown so rapidly that many state institutions are at or beyond capacity, with some patients held for decades or even indefinitely.

The specific legal criteria for involuntary civil commitment vary across states, but most states rely on the dangerousness criterion. In theory, it assesses if a mentally ill person poses a threat of danger to themselves or others to determine whether to initiate civil commitment proceedings. However, states generally do not distinguish between the danger posed to oneself and the danger posed to others in determining the appropriate interventions. The law affirms that states, pursuant to their parens patriae power, or the authority to act as a guardian for those unable to act on their own behalf, have a substantial interest in subjecting people with mental illness to involuntary commitment to ensure their safety or their community’s safety.

So even when no crime has been committed, people can be medically incarcerated. In a country that guarantees a constitutional right to liberty and due process, that poses a serious problem.

Trump’s call for increased institutionalization, therefore, bears a striking similarity to the cruelty of his other policies: It capitalizes on widespread anxiety about community safety in order to justify expanding carceral control of “deviant” groups. People of color and other historically marginalized populations will bear the brunt of any such expansion. People of color are more likely to be found incompetent to stand trial, and Black people are three to four times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Black and Native people are disproportionately impacted by institutionalization and are more likely to be mandated to receive involuntary outpatient treatment.

Much like the proposal the Trump administration is weighing today, previous policies meant to reduce gun violence ultimately increased surveillance and criminalization of people with psychiatric disabilities.  For example, 43 states currently require or authorize that people flagged by the state due to certain mental-health adjudications have their names reported to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Four more states require such collection in an in-state database, each of which place people who have been involuntarily committed on lists alongside those convicted of violent crimes to bar them from purchasing firearms. Following the shootings at Virginia Tech, mental health related reporting to NICS spiked by 700 percent in just under seven years.

This becomes increasingly important as a focus on suicide becomes a larger target in gun violence prevention. While politicians have previously been met with skepticism for pinning mass shootings on mental illness, they have found support when focusing on the danger that people with mental illness are presumed to pose to themselves. This allows politicians to dodge the issues underpinning mass gun violence, instead targeting a population of people with much less political capital (people with mental illness) rather than the main perpetrators of mass shootings (straight white men). In that sense, they are leveraging sanism to protect white supremacist patriarchy.

As a result, the focus on suicidality is likely to increase the number of people who are institutionalized, without decreasing the number of mass shootings.

The American mental health system is violent. People with mental illness, particularly people of color with mental illness, are increasingly subject to punitive coercive treatment instead of community-based models for healing and care. The national fixation on mental illness which inevitably follows mass shootings is harmful not only because it does nothing to curb gun violence, but because it is a pretext for entrenching and expanding oppression.

Each time gun violence and mental illness are discussed together, we ultimately reinforce the discriminatory assumptions which animate our laws and justify dehumanizing treatment and oppression of psychiatrically disabled people.

My parents raised my sisters and me here in the U.S., with security and opportunity we could never have in Sudan. Yet, the cruel irony is that my parents would have loved nothing more than to see us grow up on our ancestral lands. Instead, compelled by economic and political unrest, they left their loved ones behind and immigrated to northern Virginia, a move that they never would have been able to make if a new Trump immigration rule had been in effect.

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The new policy, which would expand the existing public charge rule, would require most immigrants seeking green cards to show they have a middle-class income and that they have not (and will never) receive government benefits, including Medicaid and Medicare Part D, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), or housing assistance programs. It would radically rewrite our immigration system to explicitly favor white, wealthy, and non-disabled immigrant applicants.

Most abhorrent of all, it threatens immigrants’ livelihoods by punishing them for using the public benefits they need to survive, just as the U.S. contributed to the disruption of their livelihoods abroad through militarism and unchecked state violence.

In 1998, not long after my parents moved to the U.S., they had to watch their new country attack the homeland they were forced to leave only years before. The American military, under orders from President Bill Clinton, bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, leveling the only factory in the country producing cheap medicine for tuberculosis or veterinary needs. (Sudan’s economy was primarily based on agriculture.)

The bombing of Al-Shifa, which represented at least 50 percent of total domestic pharmaceutical production, devastated the already strained Sudanese medical system. The Clinton administration justified the attack by claiming it had evidence showing the plant was being used by Al Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons — evidence that later proved untrue.

Twenty years later, my extended family in Sudan is still managing electricity and water cut offs, gas shortages, and economic insecurity. The U.S. trade embargo, imposed after Sudan was designated as a state sponsor of terror, has served only to deepen wealth inequality in Sudan while empowering Al-Bashir’s brutally repressive military regime to hoard the nation’s wealth and operate with total impunity.

Since 2000, more than 360,000 Sudanese people have immigrated to the United States, like my parents did. Many people arriving at our borders today have been directly impacted by U.S. foreign policy.

Only a few years after the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, the administration of President George W. Bush launched the catastrophic “War on Terror.” In the years since 9/11, some half a million people have been killed as a consequence of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone. Another 21 million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria have become displaced. Today, the U.S.-led “War on Terror” spans 76 countries.

Iraq remains one of the top 10 countries of origin for permanent immigrants to the U.S. annually. In fact, seven of those 10 countries have been subject to violent foreign intervention by the U.S. or crushing economic blockades and sanctions, including Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, and El Salvador. Nevertheless, if the public charge rule is implemented in its current form, 60 percent of Central American immigrants and 34 percent of African immigrants would be at high risk of denial.

This is not an accident — it is part of the plan to base our immigration system on white supremacy. The president has made that explicit in his language, and in his broader immigration policies.

Consider what happened with Trump’s very first immigration policy. In January 2017, the administration issued its infamous Muslim Ban, temporarily banning entry of immigrants from my parents’ homeland of Sudan, along with six other majority-Muslim nations. Every country on that list had been subject to violent foreign intervention by the U.S., a fact first pointed out by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT).

Shortly after the ban went into effect, I hurried to Dulles International Airport to provide translation for those impacted. Within an hour, I was approached by a Sudanese father and his young family. I learned that they had been granted an opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. through the Diversity Visa Program, the same program my parents had used in the 1980s (and which the Trump administration has also tried to get rid of).

The father was afraid for his family and asked me to help him arrange their flight back. If they left, they would almost certainly never be able to return, so I pleaded with him to stay and seek legal support. But as he looked around at the chaotic scene unfolding in the airport, this young father of two remained unconvinced. He gripped his wife’s hand and left.

I never learned what became of him, but I still remember his parting words: “I can’t bring my family to a country that doesn’t want us.”

Immigration policy that ties admissibility solely to a person’s perceived economic and social worth is inherently violent. We cannot at once claim to be the world’s moral authority, while entrenching ableism and white supremacy through exclusionary policies at home and imperialist violence abroad. My family has carried the weight of these policies for decades, and millions more will be devastated if the Trump administration has its way.