Black unemployment is rising—critics say Trump’s ‘Black jobs’ promise was a lie

“Just like the workers on his construction projects, Donald Trump wrote the Black community a bad check during the campaign,” said Markus Batchelor, political director at People For the American Way.

While campaigning for this return to the White House during the 2024 election, Donald Trump warned Black voters that undocumented immigrants were taking their so-called “Black jobs.”

“They’re taking Black jobs now, and it could be 18, it could be 19, and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs,” Trump said during his June 27, 2024, presidential debate against former President Joe Biden. The remark was quickly slammed by advocates and Democrats as both false and racially divisive.

Trump repeated the claim along the campaign trail, including his explosive interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

“Coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking Black jobs,” Trump asserted at the time, prompting gasps in the room of Black reporters. “They’re taking the employment away from Black people…they’re coming in [and] they’re invading.”

A year later, Trump is now back in the White House, where he has followed through on his campaign promise to detain and deport mass populations of undocumented immigrants. However, what has not come into fruition is his promise to secure more Black jobs.

As theGrio reported last week, the most recent jobs report revealed that the Black unemployment rate spiked to its highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.

“During the most recent presidential campaign, we heard the offensive rhetoric that Black people had ‘Black jobs’ and that migrants were taking those jobs from Black people,” said Global Black Economic Forum President and CEO Alphonso David. He told theGrio, “Those claims were categorically false then and the recent job numbers amplify that point.”

He continued, “Despite the aggressive and in many cases lawless attempts to deport migrants, the unemployment rate for Black people in the United States has climbed to 7.2%, representing the highest level since the pandemic’s peak impact and higher than the overall U.S. population.”

Markus Batchelor, political director at People For the American Way, told theGrio of the latest jobs report, “Just like the workers on his construction projects, Donald Trump wrote the Black community a bad check during the campaign.”

Trump’s economic policies, most notably his tariff program, which economic experts say is causing uncertainty for investors and risks driving up prices for goods, are being blamed for the latest Black unemployment numbers. Trump has also fired or laid off tens of thousands of federal workers in an attempt to shrink the federal government, which disproportionately hires Black workers.

Batchelor explained, “For all the ‘Black Jobs’ he said immigrants would take, Donald Trump has taken the most — slashing support for Black farmers, gutting a disproportionately Black federal workforce, and even forcing private businesses to end efforts that diversify their workforce.”

“This isn’t a president who came in and said, ‘We’re going to increase funding for MWBE (Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprises). This isn’t a president who said we’re going to work on wages,” said Jamarr Brown, executive director of Color of Change PAC, the political arm of the progressive social justice organization of the same name.

Brown told theGrio, “This is a president who came in and [eliminated] jobs, who’s fighting labor unions, which fight for the protection and dignity of workers every single day.”

The political operative said Trump, who has made his anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda a major feature of his administration, has “done everything to cut opportunities” and “doesn’t care” about creating an inclusive economic agenda, particularly for Black Americans who largely didn’t “vote for him and any of his extremist allies.”

Though Trump appeared to center “Black jobs” during his 2024 campaign, Brown argued that it was never an actual campaign promise but rather a “campaign gimmick” to “confuse Black people with misinformation and disinformation” about the record of President Biden’s administration.

“He wanted to engage Black people in some myth that they were not being helped by the previous [Biden] administration, which, if you look at the investments of that administration, billions of dollars going to the Black community,” he explained. “We haven’t seen any of that from Donald Trump.”

Following Friday’s jobs report, which also revealed a slowing of hiring with only 73,000 jobs added in July, Trump instead blamed Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, accusing her of falsifying statistical data without evidence to support his claim. The president immediately fired McEntarfer, who was appointed by President Biden.

“So what he’s doing is to eliminate people who will bring the data and the truth and the reality of where our economy sits right now,” said Brown. “That is even more dangerous than the low numbers that were reported.”