The Winooski School District in Vermont did something simple: it raised the Somali flag. The gesture was deliberate and clear — a show of solidarity with its Somali students following President Donald Trump’s public tirade against Somali people living in Minnesota during a Cabinet meeting.

Within hours of the district posting images and video of the flag-raising, the phones started ringing. According to the superintendent, the school was inundated with hateful, harassing, and threatening calls and messages. Callers used racial slurs including the N-word. Some threatened violence directly: “We’re coming for you. You don’t know what’s coming.”

This is what it looks like when a president uses his platform to target an immigrant community. The rhetoric flows downward. It reaches people who feel emboldened to pick up the phone and threaten a school for flying a flag. It reaches children who now have to walk into a building that received death threats for standing up for them.

The Somali community in the United States — many of whom arrived as refugees fleeing war and persecution — has increasingly been made a political target. Trump’s Cabinet meeting remarks were not a policy disagreement. They were an attack on a community, delivered from the most powerful office in the world, with entirely predictable consequences.

“Targeting a public school for standing in solidarity with Somali students sends a chilling message,” United Voices said. “We reject the idea that showing respect for immigrant communities is in any way controversial.”

United Voices is calling on local and federal law enforcement to investigate every threatening communication the Winooski school district received and to pursue charges against anyone responsible for hate-based harassment or threats. We are also calling on elected officials — particularly those whose words created the climate that produced these threats — to reckon publicly with the consequences of dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at immigrant and Muslim communities.

A school that stands with its students should be celebrated. Instead, it received death threats. That tells you everything you need to know about where we are — and how much further we have to go.