Zarna Garg Isn’t Just Wrong About Indian Americans and Trump – She’s Advancing a Dangerous Lie

Indian Americans have consistently voted for Democrats.

Zarna Garg wants America to believe that Indian Americans “love” Donald Trump. Recently, the Indian American comedian gave an interview suggesting our community, unlike other brown minority groups, was pro-Trump. She rooted her claim in an argument that, like much of her comedy, played into harmful stereotypes about immigrants. The assertion is also flatly false – and politically dangerous.

As an Indian American political commentator, I often encounter the narrative Garg promoted, that our community is Republican-leaning. The data is clear. In 2016, only 16 percent of Indian Americans voted for Trump. In 2020, Indian Americans overwhelmingly supported Joe Biden. And, in 2024, despite aggressive Republican outreach and disinformation campaigns, a majority of Indian Americans backed Vice President Kamala Harris – the first South Asian nominee of a major party. This isn’t a vibes-based argument. It’s an empirical reality.

When Garg tells millions of viewers that Indian Americans “love” Trump, she’s not offering a hot take – she’s erasing the political behavior of an entire community in service of a narrative the far right desperately wants to be true.

Worse, she justifies her claim using a classic myth: that Indian immigrants waited patiently and “did things the right way” only to be betrayed by a system that rewards undocumented immigrants who cut the line. She goes so far as to claim Indian Americans felt cheated by President Biden’s administration in this regard.

The model minority myth has always served two purposes: disciplining other minority communities by holding up certain Asian groups as proof that racism can be overcome through obedience, and fracturing solidarity among marginalized groups by constructing a fake hierarchy of who deserves dignity. Garg’s rhetoric fits squarely within that tradition.

She suggests that Indian immigrants are uniquely lawful while others are opportunistic. Here again, data shows, Garg is misinformed. According to Pew, after Mexico, the largest undocumented populations in the U.S. come from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras – and India. Indian people are undocumented at significant scale, facing the same precarity, exploitation, and fear of deportation as other migrant populations.

Yet, the myth of the “good immigrant” remains politically useful. It allows Republicans to launder cruelty through selective praise: they’re not racist, they just want the right type of people to come here. Suddenly mass deportations, asylum bans, family separation, and visa purges become neutral policy. Cut to Usha Vance at the 2024 RNC telling her immigrant story as delegates held up “Mass Deportation Now” signs.

Reality exposes the lie.

Most recently, immigrants who had already been approved for U.S. citizenship were pulled out of their own naturalization oath ceremonies and detained by federal officials based on which country they were from. These were people who followed every rule and waited every year – only to be seized at the very final step.

Indian Americans understand this. NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, himself a naturalized citizen, recently stood before New Yorkers to remind them that regardless of status, they still have constitutional rights in the face of immigration raids. That is the tradition Indian American political leadership actually comes from: not alignment with authoritarianism, but resistance to it. My own family history sits inside that lineage. My great great great uncle, Veer Nariman, helped organize the Salt March alongside Mahatma Gandhi. It was a campaign of mass civil disobedience that helped crack British rule. Millions of other Indian Americans can also trace their roots to ancestors who fought to dismantle empire and build the world’s largest democracy. Our political inheritance is not obedience to unchecked power, but defiance of it.

By falsely aligning Indian Americans with Trump, Garg accomplishes three things at once. She offers the right cultural validation. She legitimizes an immigration framework that will inevitably harm Indian families themselves. And she helps fracture the multiracial coalitions that make progress possible.

Let’s be clear about what Trumpism has meant for Indian Americans.

It has meant a Muslim ban, which stranded South Asian families at airports. It has meant violent rhetoric that emboldens white supremacists who do not distinguish between Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Arabs before they make an Islamophobic attack. It means direct assaults on H-1B visas and OPT. It means surging anti-Indian American hate, fueled by Trump’s racist language.

The most corrosive part of Garg’s argument, however, is not even her Trump lie. It is the insistence that Indian grievance be redirected downward – toward other immigrants – rather than upward, toward the political system that manufactures false scarcity.

This is why Garg’s narrative matters. At a moment when the right is openly attempting to peel off nonwhite voters through resentment politics: “border invasion” hysteria, fearmongering, and selective praise of some minorities over others – voices like hers provide the cover that makes those strategies feel respectable.

Indian Americans are not a monolith. There are conservatives, Republicans, and Trump voters in our community – but there is no honest reading of the data that supports the fiction that we are a pro-Trump bloc. And if we allow ourselves to be weaponized against other marginalized groups, we won’t be rewarded with belonging. The model minority lie only works until it’s your turn to be discarded.