Zarna Garg, an Indian American comedian, is in the middle of an online firestorm after she claimed on a recent podcast that the Indian community in the United States loves U.S. president Donald Trump and made other sweeping comments attempting to dunk on undocumented immigrants.
Garg is wrong on several counts. And it is important to point them out.
Garg is a comedian, and hence dissecting her views on immigration might seem like overkill. But then, she has a large following — with over 1.8 million followers on Instagram, more than 400,000 subscribers on YouTube, and was making these comments on a channel with over half a million subscribers. In addition, on the podcast itself, she attempted to speak on behalf of all Indians and Indian Americans in the United States.
It is for these reasons that it is worth getting into the details of what Garg said and pointing out the problems in her comments.
What Zarna Garg Said, and What the Facts Are
On a recent podcast with The Daily Beast, Garg said, “The Indian community loves Trump. We don't have the problems with him that a lot of people in America have.”
She also said, “When it comes to immigration, Indian people by and large are legal immigrants in America. Which means it was years of waiting, years of applying paperwork, hundreds and thousands of verifications, and ‘submit this’ and ‘submit that’.”
Garg continued, “So the whole illegal immigration thing was something that we never really got on board with. We did not understand what was happening during the Biden administration. We could not understand why they were not taking this seriously. Because we all ask any Indian person, we have relatives who've been waiting fifteen years in line because that's the right thing to do. And then, yet it felt like anybody who was breaking the law was getting rewarded.”
There are so many things to unpack here, so let’s take it one at a time.
First off, there is no data to show that Indian Americans by and large love Donald Trump. If anything, there is a significant amount of data that contradicts that claim.
For instance, as per AAPI Data, a respected research and policy organization that studies Asian American communities, a 2024 survey shows that over half of Indian American voters (55%) identify as Democrat or lean Democrat. This was down by only four percentage points from the tally in 2020. Additionally, just over 1 in 4 Indian American voters (26%) identify as Republican or lean Republican, up by five percentage points from the tally in 2020.
But Zarna Garg, with zero substantiation, wishes to generalize the Indian American community at large as loving Donald Trump.
Secondly, Garg claimed that Indians “never really got on board” with “the whole illegal immigration thing”.
According to Pew Research Center, Indians accounted for the third largest unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. in 2022, at around 725,000 people. India ranked only behind Mexico and El Salvador.
The 2022 estimate of the Department of Homeland Security was lower (around 220,000), but the DHS data implied that roughly 7% of the entire Indian foreign-born population in the U.S was unauthorized during that year, according to the research paper ‘Unauthorized Indians in the United States: Trends and Developments’ by academics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
The idea, therefore, that undocumented immigration is something that Indians don’t do is flat-out false. But beyond the numbers and the data, this attempt to dunk on undocumented immigrants by pretending to be some “model immigrant” community doesn’t really help either.
Furthering the ‘Good Immigrant’ - ‘Bad Immigrant’ Narrative
Garg’s comments serve to further a ‘good immigrant’ - ‘bad immigrant’ binary that is totally removed from how Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown is actually taking place.
Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown includes the targeting of Indian immigrants. According to VIGIL’s analysis of government data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to a public records request by the Deportation Data Project, there have been 1,978 arrests recorded by ICE of Indian nationals in the United States since the day Trump took office in January 2025. A whopping 84% of those arrests (1,660) were of Indian individuals with no criminal convictions.
Across the United States, 63% of all ICE arrests since 20 January, the day Trump took office, have been of individuals with no convictions. 34% of the arrests have been of individuals with no convictions and no pending criminal charges. All this, while Donald Trump and members of his administration continue to claim that they are going after “the worst of the worst” in their immigration enforcement crackdown.
To amplify anti-immigrant talking points at such a time seems to be deeply irresponsible.
For instance, when Garg said, “...yet, it felt like anybody who was breaking the law was getting rewarded” while referring to undocumented immigrants, she was amplifying anti-immigrant talking points of the right to try and show Indian immigrants in a better light.
What Garg either doesn’t realize or chooses not to mention is that it is the same dialing up of anti-immigrant rhetoric by the right and sections of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) base that has led to an increase in hostilities targeting Indians in the United States.
According to a report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a research organization based in Washington, D.C., there has been a surge in online anti-Indian racism in the United States in recent months, aimed at both Indian-American citizens and non-citizens of perceived Indian origin.
This hate hasn’t been limited to online spaces either. A city councilmember in Florida called for the mass deportation of Indians and said that Indians come to the U.S. to “drain our pockets”. In Texas, masked men staged a protest carrying signs that called Hindu deities “foreign demons” and described Diwali as “garbage.” One of their signs also said “Don’t India My Texas.”
Regardless of how much Garg seeks to push the ‘good immigrant’ - ’bad immigrant’ narrative, anti-immigrant sentiment hurts Indians too — Indian-Americans who are U.S. citizens as well as Indian citizens living and working in the United States.
Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and scholar at Georgetown University, was arrested by immigration enforcement authorities for speaking up about the rights of Palestinians. Kaushik Raj, an Indian journalist, was denied a student visa by the United States with a flimsy claim that he did not have enough ties to his home country, India. There were several others like Raj who were denied student visas this year, despite securing admission to reputed U.S. universities.
On the podcast, Garg did go on to say, “I don't think he (Trump) should be doing things the way he's doing them. I have a problem with his execution, but a lot of the problems that he has highlighted are real problems. And just saying that the problem doesn't exist is not gonna make them go away.”
But minutes later, she was back to making more sweeping generalizations of the kind she had made earlier in the show. Her statements have rightly caused quite a stir, with several members of the Indian diaspora in the United States criticising Garg’s comments.
Garg’s book ‘This American Woman’ has an image of the Statue of Liberty carrying her in its arms. Liberty’s connotations with immigrants are long-standing. In fact, it is often referred to as ‘The Immigrants’ Statue’.
Yet, even according to the U.S. National Park Service, the Statue of Liberty being an emblem of the United States as a refuge for the poor and persecuted, was a story that masked immigrant setbacks in the United States, and “tended to favor the European side of immigration at the expense of trials encountered by newcomers from Latin America and Asia”.
The ‘good immigrant’ - ‘bad immigrant’ narrative, after all, isn’t new. And Garg, and Indian-Americans at large, would do well to realize that furthering or justifying anti-immigrant sentiments by positioning Indians as some sort of model immigrants won’t really cause the brunt of those sentiments to not impact Indians as well.
(This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)