Elon Musk is trying to rebrand X, formerly known as Twitter, as a platform for “citizen journalists.” In this effort, he went to Eagle Pass, Texas, last Thursday to promote the app’s livestream video feature. In one of his two livestreams, he said he had come to Eagle Pass to “get the real story” and meet with “major officials and law enforcement responsible for the border.”
Musk didn’t speak with any migrants or residents of Eagle Pass. Nor did he interview migration experts or even the Border Patrol.
Getting the “real story” or even offering a bit of context and analysis wasn’t the point. Instead, Musk’s videos were more border theater and grist for the disinformation mill—a growing social media ecosystem in which users portray migrants and asylum seekers as “invaders” and the border as wide open under Biden. Dis-content creators make a tidy profit stoking election-denial conspiracies and racist tropes online. It’s all about the attention economy and ad shares. And Musk, whose X has been losing advertising money by the bucketloads, is desperate for a piece of it.
Musk’s visit to Eagle Pass was a cynical move using desperate, marginalized people as an attention grabber to promote his app’s livestream feature, which didn’t work, by the way; the livestream froze four minutes into his broadcast. He had to restart the video after sending a sharp email to his X employees to “please fix this.” Unfortunately, the dozen people Musk hadn’t fired yet soon had him back online.
Dominating much of Musk’s livestream was U.S. Representative Tony Gonzales, a Republican who represents Eagle Pass and a large swathe of the Texas-Mexico border, in a heavily gerrymandered district. It may go down as one of the biggest missed opportunities in history for border communities. Gonzales was standing next to the second-richest man on earth during a livestream that now has over 100 million views, and what does he say?
Gonzales could have mentioned that children are drowning in the river behind them, and thousands are dying on these migratory routes north because there are no legal avenues for them to come to the United States and work in jobs that we badly need to fill as our workforce population ages. He could have talked in depth about fixing the asylum backlog or multiple other solutions that he as a congressional member should be working on.
Instead, he spiraled into the same old tired MAGA script we’ve been hearing for years. “It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse,” he says. Gonzales launches into the “Biden open borders” spiel. “Here in the Del Rio sector, there are 2,500 coming illegally a day, and we’re sending zero back,” he says.
He claims that every other White House has deported people, but “this White House hasn’t.”
“So,” Musk says, “It’s an open border for all of earth. … If someone gets in, they’re in.”
You get the gist by now. A simple online search will bring up CBP enforcement statistics for 2023, which show that more than 2 million people have been deported or turned back at the southern border. Gonzales also acts as if he weren’t part of the U.S. Congress, which—drum roll—created the U.S. asylum law. And under that law, people who are seeking protection can request asylum at any part of the border, not just ports of entry. So, what the migrants are doing in Eagle Pass is not illegal, despite what Gonzales and Musk say repeatedly throughout the videos.
They also fail to mention that at ports of entry, people are seeking asylum through the CBPOne app. But the app is frustratingly slow, and there’s not enough appointments, which is why many give up and try to cross the river instead. The app frequently crashes and is full of glitches. As a tech guy, Musk should be able to relate—except that these asylum-seeking families waiting in Mexico for the CBPOne app to work are facing kidnappings and rape by organized crime, along with starvation and illness, not a bruised ego because their livestream failed to launch.
Toward the end of one of Musk’s livestreams, we get a brief cameo from Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass. Salinas talks about how it’s been rough for his town, and that Eagle Pass’s only hospital is filled with migrants, which frustrates residents seeking care. But we never hear about why so many migrants are in the hospital. Could it be because they were injured by all the razor wire that Texas governor Greg Abbott has strung along the riverbank as part of Operation Lone Star? We never get an answer.
Musk interrupts the mayor. “FYI, if people are wondering whether it’s a rundown town, it’s really clean and nice,” he says. This from a guy whose SpaceX near Brownsville, another border community, drops burning rocket debris from the sky, incinerating protected wetlands, has his own private security force close down public roads near his Starbase, and where a young woman was arrested and interrogated by police for allegedly graffiting “Gentrified Stop SpaceX” on a Musk-funded mural downtown.
What goes unsaid, is that everyone Musk speaks to from the sheriffs who receive funding from Operation Lone Star to Gonzales and the billionaire himself, profit from the humanitarian crisis unfurling in the backdrop. At one point, Musk, who is from South Africa, acknowledges that he too is an immigrant and is “super in favor of greatly expanding and simplifying legal immigration.” But by the end, he’s equating asylum seekers at the border with “tattooed gang members” and “serial murderers.”
Perhaps the biggest irony from Musk’s visit to the border is that a recent poll shows that the constant “Biden open borders” narrative coming from right-wing politicians and media is leading more people to come. A lot more people may have been convinced to make the dangerous journey by Musk and Gonzales’s videos, which were streamed to millions of viewers with their false and insistent message that the U.S.-Mexico border is wide open and that there are no consequences for crossing.
In the end, all Musk did in Eagle Pass was throw fuel on the fire, then walk away. With all that wealth and access, he’s still just an isolated man, hiding behind mirrored aviators, who couldn’t even reach across the barrier and make a meaningful human connection to tell the real story.
For more context:
These women fight right-wing extremists by defunding their online ad revenue
Read this weekly summary from WOLA on border and migration
Listen to our podcast on how online disinformation leads to authoritarianism
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