WASHINGTON — The video shared by former President Donald Trump features horror movie music and footage of migrants reportedly entering the US from countries including Cameroon, Afghanistan and China. Images of men with tattoos and videos of violent crimes are juxtaposed against close-ups of people waving and wrapping themselves in American flags.
“They’re coming in the thousands,” Trump says in the video on his social media site. “We will secure our borders. And we will restore sovereignty.”
In his speeches and online posts, Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric as he visits the White House for a third time, portraying migrants as dangerous criminals who are “poisoning the blood of America.” His messages touch on the country’s deepest fault lines around race and national identity and are often based on untruths about migration. But it resonates with many of his core supporters going back a decade, when “build the wall” chants began ringing out at his rallies.
President Joe Biden and his allies are discussing the border very differently. The Democrat is portraying the situation as a policy dispute that Congress can resolve, hitting Republicans in Washington for withdrawing from a border security deal after receiving criticism from Trump.
But a potentially worrying sign for Biden appears to be that Trump’s message is resonating with key elements of the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to win over in November.
About two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of Biden’s handling of border security, including about 4 in 10 Democrats, 55% of Black adults and 73% of Hispanic adults, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center poll for Public Affairs Research in March.
A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 45% of Americans described the situation as a crisis, while another 32% said it was a major problem.
Vetress Boyce, a Chicago-based racial justice activist, was among those who expressed frustration with Biden’s immigration policies and the city’s approach to housing newly arrived migrants. She argued that Democrats should focus on economic investments in Black communities, not newcomers.
“They send us people to starve, just like the blacks in this country are starving. They send us people who want to escape the conditions and come here for a better lifestyle, while those here are suffering and have been suffering for over 100 years,” Boyce said. “That recipe is a mix for disaster. It is a disaster waiting to happen.”
Gracie Martinez is a 52-year-old Hispanic small business owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, the border town Trump visited in February when he and Biden took same day trips to the state. Martinez said she once voted for former President Barack Obama and is still a Democrat, but now supports Trump — mainly because of the border.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “It’s a lot of people and they’re giving them medical supplies, money and phones,” she said, complaining that those who have gone through the legal immigration system are being treated worse.
Priscilla Hesles, 55, a teacher who lives in Eagle Pass, Texas, described the current situation as “almost a catch-up” that had changed the city.
‘We don’t know where they are hiding. We don’t know where they have infiltrated and where they will come out,” said Hesles, who said she used to take an evening walk to a local church but stopped after being shocked by an encounter with a group of men she claimed they were migrants.
Immigration will almost certainly be one of the central issues in the November election, with both parties spending the next six months trying to portray the other as at fault on border security.
The president’s re-election campaign recently launched a $30 million ad campaign targeting Latino audiences in key swing states, including a digital ad in English and Spanish that echoes Trump’s past description of Mexican immigrants as “criminals.” and ‘rapists’ is emphasized.
The White House has also been considering a series of executive actions that could dramatically tighten immigration restrictions, effectively bypassing Congress after it failed to pass the bipartisan deal that Biden approved.
“Trump is a fraudster who is only out for himself,” said Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz. “We will make sure voters know that in November.”
Trump will campaign in Wisconsin and Michigan this week on Tuesday, where he is expected to take on Biden again on immigration. His campaign said its event in the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids will focus on what was reportedly “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”
The former president calls the recent record high arrests over border crossings in the Southwest an “invasion” orchestrated by Democrats to transform the makeup of America. Trump accuses Biden of deliberately allowing criminals and potential terrorists to enter the country unchecked, even going so far as to claim the president is involved in a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”
He also labels migrants – including many women and children escaping poverty and violence – as “poisoning the blood” of America with medicine and disease, claiming that some are “not human.” Experts who study extremism warn against the use of dehumanizing language when describing migrants.
There is no evidence that foreign governments are emptying their prisons or mental institutions, as Trump says. And while conservative reporting is dominated by several high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally, the latest FBI statistics show that overall violent crime in the US fell again last year, marking a downward trend continues after a pandemic era. peak.
Research has also shown that people living in the country illegally are arrested much less often than native-born Americans for violent, drug and property crimes.
“The past few months have certainly seen a marked shift in political support,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant resettlement group Global Refuge and a former Obama administration and State Department official.
“I think this has to do with the rhetoric of recent years,” she said, “and this dynamic of being outpaced by loud, extreme xenophobic rhetoric that has not yet been countered by the reality and the facts on the ground.”
Part of what makes the border so striking is that its impact is felt far from the border.
Trump allies, most notably Texas Governor Greg Abbott, have used state-funded buses to send more than 100,000 migrants to Democratic-run cities like New York, Denver and Chicago, where Democrats will host the convention this summer to hold. Although the program was initially dismissed as a publicity stunt, the influx has strained city budgets and forced local leaders to provide emergency housing and medical care to new groups of migrants.
In the meantime, local reporting was often negative. Viewers have seen migrants blamed for everything from a string of gang-related robberies in New Jersey to burglaries targeting stores in suburban Philadelphia to measles cases in parts of Arizona and Illinois.
Abbott has sent the Texas National Guard to the border, placed concertina wire along parts of the Rio Grande in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court orders and has argued that his state should be able to enforce its own immigration laws.
Some far-right Internet sites point to Abbott’s actions as the first salvo in a coming civil war. And Russia has also helped spread and amplify misleading and inflammatory content about U.S. immigration and border security as part of its broader efforts to polarize Americans. A recent analysis by the Russian disinformation tracking firm Logically found that online influencers and social media accounts linked to the Kremlin have pushed the idea of a new civil war and attempts by states like Texas to secede from the union seized.
Amy Cooter, who directs research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, worries that the current wave of talk of civil war will only increase as the election approaches. So far this has generally been limited to far-right message boards. But immigration in general is enough of a concern to increase its political potency, Cooter said.
“Non-extremist Americans are concerned about this too,” she said. “It’s about culture and perceptions of who an American is.”
In the meantime, there are people like Rudy Menchaca, an Eagle Pass bar owner who also works for a company that imports Corona beer from Mexico and blames the problems at the border for hurting business.
Menchaca is the kind of Hispanic voter Biden is counting on to support his re-election bid. The 27-year-old said he was never a fan of Trump’s rhetoric and the way he portrayed Hispanics and Mexicans. “We’re not all like that,” he said.
But he also said he was excited about the idea of supporting the former president because of the realities on the ground.
“I need those soldiers if I want to do my business,” Menchaca said of the Texas troops being sent to the border. “The bad ones that get in, they can get in.”
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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers David Klepper in Washington and Matt Brown in Chicago contributed to this report.