How Trump acolytes seized on UK teen’s killing to push anti-immigration agenda

Tributes to Henry Nowak in Southampton on Saturday. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA View image in fullscreen Tributes to Henry Nowak in Southampton on Saturday. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA How Trump acolytes seized on UK teen’s killing to push anti-immigration agenda Senior administration officials jump on death of Henry Nowak – and statements echo language of the far right O ver a breathtaking few days that spanned Saturday’s 82nd anniversary of D-day, senior Trump administration officials have trampled over diplomatic protocol to tear into Europe’s immigration and anti-racism policies and argue that such actions could end western civilization. From the United States, Vice-President JD Vance and other administration officials jumped on a controversial murder case in Britain to accuse Keir Starmer’s government of lacking the Trump administration’s “political will and leadership” to stop mass migration and defend national sovereignty. From an American cemetery in Normandy, Pete Hegseth , the defense secretary, suggested that the freedom the allies had fought for in 1944 risked being upended by a new “invasion” of migrants threatening the European continent. These extraordinary interventions in the policy decisions of allied countries were sparked by a growing controversy in Britain over the killing of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old white student stabbed by a Sikh man wielding a ceremonial dagger and then mistakenly arrested in his dying moments because police thought he was the perpetrator, not the victim, of a crime. Under the usual rules of international engagement, the case would most likely have prompted no official US reaction at all. Instead, Nowak has become a rallying cry for the international far right. Statements from Vance and the US state department echoed the arguments – and the language – of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party that it is an illustration of multiculturalism and political correctness gone mad. “Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit,” Vance wrote on X , even as far-right activists and Reform leaders were clashing with police in Southampton, the university city on the south coast where Nowak studied and died. “Each time a life like his is lost,” Vance added, “the proper response – the only response – is righteous anger.” Those words closely tracked an earlier statement from Farage that said: “We should respond to this with pure, cold rage.” View image in fullscreen Pete Hegseth at the D-day commemoration in Colleville-sur-Mer on Saturday. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, refrained from criticizing Vance directly. But a statement from his office issued in the wake of his X post referred to unnamed people “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets”. Starmer and other British politicians have also accused Farage of going