Trump’s reelection campaign promised he would focus on deporting “criminals,” inspired by years of right-wing fearmongering about supposed immigrant crime. But less than a year into his second term, Trump’s mass deportation plan has targeted pregnant women, children, and students who have never committed crimes. This reversal may come as a surprise to some media outlets, but it's the result of a race-baiting misinformation campaign led by right-wing media for nearly a decade.

The migrant crime smoke screen

In 2015, Trump launched his campaign with an extreme stance on immigration, calling for ending birthright citizenship, building a wall at the southern border, and “rounding them all up” for mass deportation. 

Despite the clarity of Trump’s positions, many media outlets assumed he wasn’t being serious, repeatedly asking his campaign for clarifications or insisting that his plan must be more nuanced. As Vox’s Dara Lind put it:

As a result, Trump was able to publicly reverse his immigration stance. Just months before the election, Trump’s campaign shifted gears, claiming it would focus first on deporting “criminal illegal immigrants.”

In reality, though, that supposed softening turned out to be a smoke screen. A report by the CATO Institute found that, during his first term, Trump detained increasing numbers of noncriminals and released more criminals than his predecessor had: 

An immigration “crisis”

Rather than recognizing Trump’s smoke screen, many news outlets continued to parrot his talking points in the years after Trump’s first term – and they were led by Fox News.

According to Media Matters research, Fox News significantly increased its coverage of anti-immigrant stories during Biden’s first term, emphasizing migrant “caravans,” and a “crisis” at the southern border. 

In response, many traditional news outlets increased their coverage of anti-immigrant stories in line with Fox. Media Matters found that “CNN and MSNBC, which largely hadn’t been using the 'crisis' framing in their conversations about the border, began to do so more heavily the week after Fox News’ oversaturated coverage.”

That coverage repeatedly framed immigration as a crisis that Democrats needed to respond to, laying the foundation for a second Trump campaign focused on dealing with the immigration “crisis.”

The mask comes off

Once Trump won reelection, all of the fearmongering about “criminals” and claims that he was deporting the “worst of the worst” evaporated. Within weeks, it became clear that the Trump administration wasn’t actually interested in focusing on criminals – instead, a majority of those detained by ICE have reportedly had no criminal convictions. 

Rather than acknowledge the contradiction, however, conservative media outlets like Fox News revealed what we knew all along – it was never about “migrant crime.” 

At the start of Trump’s second term, Fox was still praising his supposed “worst first” policy, calling deportees “dirtbags” and saying the policy “may be the best thing” Trump does. Once it became clear that people with no criminal record were being deported, Fox covered for the administration, claiming that “these are not the abuelitas” and that those being deported must be “hanging out with the violent criminals.” 

When officials tried to deport a student over his role in campus protests against the U.S.' support for Israel, Fox again defended the deportation, claiming free speech is only “for our citizens.” When Trump began sending immigrants to a brutal prison camp without due process, Fox continued to go along with it, insisting that “we know that these are dangerous gang members” and arguing that “it's not practical to think that we can do due process on 8 million people.”

Perhaps no Fox News personality better embodied this about-face than Harris Faulkner, host of The Faulkner Focus. Faulkner was a large contributor to the “migrant crime wave” narrative over the past few years, and she repeatedly pushed the idea that Trump was going to target only criminals to start. But as Trump’s deportation regime expanded, so did Faulkner’s definition of “crime.” By February, Faulkner was claiming that merely being in the country illegally amounted to committing a crime, excusing the deportation of nonviolent immigrants. Weeks later, Faulkner was claiming that immigrants “don’t have the same rights as we do as citizens” to due process and advocating for the deportation of pregnant women and children, asking, “That’s against our soul if we don't protect little ones, no matter where they come from, and if they need to be sent back, how do we do that?”

Who comes next?

This about-face should come as no surprise: Fox’s view on immigrants has long been clear. 

In fact, along with fearmongering about “migrant crime,” Fox has also long been pushing nativist propaganda on air, including bringing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory to the masses. In 2018, Fox host Laura Ingraham claimed that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” This line of thinking has been cited as the inspiration for at least four mass shootings and has also been used by Trump to rile up his voter base.

Now in office, Trump is acting on his white nationalist-inspired agenda, planning for an “Office of Remigration,” another term for ethnic cleansing.

The question now is how far this ethnic cleansing will go. Citizens are already being imprisoned in Trump’s immigration “crackdown,” and more citizens are likely to be swept up as the right advocates for running deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings” and pushes for higher deportation numbers. 

Aside from the mistaken or sloppy detention of citizens, some in right-wing media have also begun calling for the intentional deportation of citizens. And Trump has indicated that he is on the same page. 

The capacity to carry out the deportation of citizens is growing thanks to the steps the Trump administration has already taken. With increased surveillance, construction of more detention centers, and normalized militarization, Trump is set to challenge the Constitution with force – which he has already shown he isn’t averse to doing. 

The media's failure to recognize the real motivation behind Trump’s immigrant crime talking point helped get us to where we are today. As the administration accelerates its plan for indiscriminate mass deportations, news outlets will have to be clear-eyed about the threat we’re facing rather than continuing to fall for white nationalist smoke screens.