It’s almost the midterm elections, and you know what that means: a caravan of scary migrants is trekking toward the border, prepared to invade the nation with their foreign criminal ways — according to Donald Trump‘s administration and right-wing media, anyway.
With early voting set to begin in some states, and Election Day only a few weeks away, Republicans are using every tool in their arsenal to try to mitigate an electoral backlash to the president’s extremely unpopular first two years back in office. That means fear mongering about migration from South and Central America. But it’s hard not to notice that these supposed migrant caravans seem to only appear shortly before an election, and disappear from the right-wing media cycle immediately after votes are cast.
Right-wing accounts on social media began posting unverified videos of an alleged migrant caravan over the weekend. The Trump administration quickly jumped on the bandwagon, sharing a hype video of Philadelphia Eagles Safety Brian Dawkins tackling players to the ground with the caption “our time has come,” in response to a post about the caravan. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security “confirmed” to Fox News that “Border Patrol is actively tracking a migrant caravan that originated in Honduras and is now moving through southern Mexico with hopes of reaching the US/Mexico border.”
DHS made sure to include in its statement to Fox that the border “has been SEALED SHUT. Anyone attempting to illegally enter the United States will be apprehended, prosecuted, and removed from the country.”
But remember, Republicans have shown voters this kind of footage before, and even some of those who once participated in immigration fear mongering and caravan hysteria are calling it out for what it is.
“We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now?” wrote former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”
In 2018, as Republicans under the first Trump administration stared down a blue wave election that would ultimately cost the GOP control of Congress, the party coalesced around feverish news coverage of a historic wave of migrants making their way towards the border. Even the mainstream press glommed on, with The Washington Post and The New York Times running over a hundred stories mentioning the caravan. Fox News led the charge on cable, mentioning the word “caravan” 1,202 times between Oct. 30 to Nov. 5 of that year — peak election season. Virtually immediately after Election Day, the caravan practically vanished from news coverage by major outlets. But Trump and his media allies had learned a valuable lesson: if they could gin up enough hysteria about it among their own base, the national press would be forced to address it.
The specter of migrant caravans would become the migratory bird of election season, arriving just as summer faded and departing for the winter once the ballots were counted.
In 2022 — another midterm year — Fox News warned that the largest caravan in history was forming at the southern border. That same year, a study conducted by the progressive watchdog Media Matters found that the network’s coverage of migrant crime dropped significantly after the elections. In 2024, networks reported on a group of roughly 2,000 migrants traveling from central America to the United States. What became of them after Trump won the White House? No one seemed to care to find out.
This year, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement — led by the cruelty and excesses of ICE and Border Patrol — have become an anvil around the neck of Republicans. The party is struggling with how to keep their base afraid of the migrant threat now that Trump has supposedly closed the border, deported the criminals, and restored sanity to the immigration system. They’ve tried fomenting a panic about Islamic influence and Sharia Law infiltrating American cities, attacked South Asian students for having too much foreign looking fun at football games, and now are reviving an old semi-reliable in the caravan.
Dutifully, Trump’s boosters parroted it out the messaging. “This migrant caravan is not good news for Dems,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote on social media. “Reminds voters about the worst of Biden and Dems.” Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec shared a headline claiming that a “mass caravan of migrants heads to the US border in anticipation of Democrats’ open border policies.” Actor turned right wing slop poster James Woods shared a video from 2023 with the caption: “Think before you vote this November.”
It’s hard to take any of it seriously when the pattern is so obvious, and even the most rabid peddlers of xenophobia in this country seem only half hearted about it.