It was only minutes after the country knew that Vice President Kamala Harris would be running for president that Republicans laid the crown of “border czar” on the new candidate.
The meme that Harris is single-handedly responsible for securing the U.S.-Mexico border quickly spread across social media. Pro-Trump outlets Fox News and Newsmax reported the falsehood at least 129 times, according to Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors conservative media. And GOP politicians repeated it in sync within hours of Harris’s announcement.
But the role of “border czar” has never existed. Instead, Harris was tasked with promoting economic programs in Central America in a diplomatic capacity under the Biden administration.
It isn’t well understood how false information like the “border czar” meme spreads so quickly across media, between campaigns and PACs, and mainstream and dark web user forums that radicalize U.S. voters.
But new artificial intelligence tools are beginning to uncover those connections, even across the dark web—a part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines and is accessible only through special software that provides anonymity to users.
These networks are now heating up, as the 2023–24 election cycle is set to see the highest level of political ad spending of any election year, according to AdImpact, an advertising intelligence agency that tracks campaign dollars.
The agency projects that Democrat and Republican campaigns will spend over $10.2 billion on advertising in this election.
From January to May, Republican campaigns invested more than $60 million on anti-immigrant messaging across six battleground states, according to Beatriz Lopez, deputy director of Immigration Hub, a Washington, DC–based migrant rights advocacy organization.
Since 2023, Lopez said, Immigration Hub has used an artificial intelligence tool known as Blackbird to study disinformation efforts related to immigration going back to 2022.
Lopez said their analysis uncovered “sophisticated coordination” between media, reporters, social media influencers, politicians, and advocacy groups. Working in tandem, they spread the same anti-immigrant messaging across a wide spectrum of conservative and right-wing spheres.
The activity is supplemented by tens of thousands of social media accounts that Blackbird identified as showing “bot-like activity.”
“If you combine this with the volume of right-wing media attention on the border, what you have is an oversized narrative on migrant crime. It’s not by coincidence, it’s by design. They’re very coordinated,” said Lopez. “They coordinate not just putting money behind the ads, but also making sure that all their surrogates, everybody who’s talking about this, is on message.”
But the messaging does not reflect reality. Undocumented immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born people, according to an analysis by Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research organization.
Even so, Nowrasteh said, MAGA Republicans are promoting an immigrant-crime narrative in the national media.
“There’s a focus on a handful of just very terrible and distressing anecdotes of individual migrants who have committed terrible crimes,” Nowrasteh said.
He added that the relatively small number of homicide cases attributed to undocumented immigrants don’t reflect a widespread trend in crime data. Yet they are relentlessly spotlighted in conservative media.
“What we know from the best crime data on immigration in the United States,” said Nowrasteh, “is that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate than native-born Americans, while legal immigrants have the lowest of all.”
Across millions of online conversations, Immigration Hub found a strong trend toward violent and dehumanizing language about migrants, including terms like “insects” and “roaches.” It also found content that associated drugs and crime with undocumented immigrants.
On television, there was a significant increase in time spent discussing migrant crime on Fox News in the days leading up to the first presidential debate, according to a report by Media Matters. The report identifies several social media accounts that belonged to super PACs supporting the Trump campaign and that republished the television segments.
Much of the coverage focused on homicide cases attributed to undocumented migrants.
“Republicans have been weaponizing immigration ever since 2016,” said Lopez. “From 2018, it was the migrant caravans, to immigrants spreading diseases in 2020. In 2022, they used ‘open border invasions.’ Today it’s migrant killings.”
Immigration is both a powerful and complicated topic for Republicans, said Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist and founder of Marson Media, a political and corporate public relations firm based in Phoenix, Arizona. While voters respond strongly to conservative messaging on the issue, Marson said, not everyone in the party is on board with how it’s been used.
“I’m a Republican but not MAGA,” said Marson. “I really cannot defend a Republican who wants to say that Maricopa County doesn’t know how to run elections, for example, but no one can say that the border is secure, because it’s really not.”
Marson said he believes that while some far-right messaging is extreme, border security remains an important issue for many voters.
“The broader electorate may not be universally unified on the solutions, but they are galvanized by the issue,” Marson said. “Whether they’re bringing drugs or not, they are crossing the border, and that offends most voters.”
But, Lopez said, this election cycle is seeing Republicans spend more money than ever on extremist, anti-immigrant messaging, which could lead to violence against communities of color.
Immigration Hub has documented a connection between online searches about immigration and Republican candidates’ digital ad spends on conservative online forums, as the party has begun to target users with keywords such as “crime,” “drugs,” and “invasion.”
The campaigns then deliver ads to those users, featuring content that associates migrants with crime.
“People become isolated and quickly become radicalized into these sort of horrible views of communities of color, immigrants included,” said Lopez.
In effect, Lopez explained, political money from GOP campaigns has found its way to the digital funnel of right-wing, anti-immigrant radicalization.
With Harris having announced her candidacy for president, Marson said, Republicans should change course on messaging.
“Republicans don’t need to villainize the people who are coming over,” he said. “Republicans have a strong enough message that the border needs to be secure. And I think the American people do want strong border security, and they want to control who is coming into this country.”
Read more: Read More