The White House is touting its crackdown on illegal immigration. But critics worry it’s putting optics ahead of substance, and reinforcing widely held misperceptions about immigrants and crime.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The Trump administration is touting its crackdown on illegal immigration as a success, but Trump’s critics say much of that crackdown is just for show. And a recent NPR poll suggests that show may be playing into widely held misperceptions about immigrants and crime. NPR’s Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: When immigration authorities launched major enforcement operations in Chicago last month, they brought along an unusual guest – Phil McGraw, the TV personality better known as Dr. Phil.
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PHIL MCGRAW: You’ve never been deported before?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You Dr. Phil. You are Dr. Phil.
MCGRAW: Yeah. How do you know me?
ROSE: Over the next few weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials carried out similar actions across the country, targeting what they call criminal aliens. And the TV cameras were never far behind, from New York City to Aurora, Colorado.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Fox News was embedded exclusively in Wednesday’s operation, which involved hundreds of federal agents.
ROSE: But that operation yielded only about 30 arrests, far fewer than the hundred members of the Tren de Aragua gang that ICE officials said they were targeting. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told NBC News that the administration was sending hardened criminals to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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KRISTI NOEM: It will hold the worst of the worst. We are going after people that had warrants out for their arrest on murders and rapes, assaults, gun purchases, drug trafficking.
ROSE: That was the public message. But in response to a lawsuit, the administration later conceded that nearly 30% of the migrants sent to Guantanamo were considered, quote, “low-threat” illegal aliens with no serious criminal record.
BRENDAN NYHAN: I worry about this model where Trump almost acts as a kind of reality show producer.
ROSE: Brendan Nyhan is a professor at Dartmouth College, where he studies political communication and misperceptions. He says ICE has conducted operations like this under previous administrations, and there have been media ride-alongs, too. But Nyhan says this level of integration between law enforcement and media feels different.
NYHAN: You worry about the tail wagging the dog, that the Trump administration is almost performing what it does for the benefit of Fox and other allied media sources.
ROSE: These videos and images have allowed President Trump to look tough on immigration, Nyhan says, even as the numbers of arrests and deportations have fallen short of the White House’s goals. At the same time, experts worry the administration is reinforcing misperceptions about immigrants and crime.
A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that people who get their news from Fox and conservative media are more likely to believe that immigrants, on average, commit more crimes than native-born people and that migrants are smuggling most of the fentanyl that’s coming across the Southern border. Those statements are both false, but our poll shows that people who get their news from Fox and conservative media were twice as likely to believe them as those who don’t. They’re also more likely to believe this claim about migrants that President Trump makes frequently without any evidence…
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Millions and millions of people that are coming from prisons, coming…
Insane asylums, there are mental institutions – and sending all of these people…
Dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions.
ROSE: The NPR/Ipsos poll found that fewer than a quarter of Americans believe that to be true, but among people who get their news from Fox and conservative media, it’s more than half.
DANNAGAL YOUNG: It’s all reinforcement effect.
ROSE: Dannagal Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware. She says it’s unclear which comes first, the media echo chamber or the misperceptions. But Young says there is an effect.
YOUNG: It’s not about learning this false information as much as it is having that false information sown into your identity, becoming more and more of a part of who you are and how you see the world. That’s the effect.
ROSE: The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. But administration officials argue that images of immigrants being detained and deported sent a strong deterrent message. And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pushed back on concerns that these immigration operations are more, quote, “spectacle,” unquote, than substance, during an interview with CBS.
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NOEM: It’s not a spectacle. This is our nation’s law enforcement judicial process. The scales of justice are equally applied to everybody. We want transparency on this.
ROSE: But media experts say there’s more going on here than transparency. Dannagal Young at the University of Delaware says the Trump administration is using the techniques of reality TV that the president honed for decades in real estate and as the star and coproducer of “The Apprentice” for 14 seasons.
YOUNG: By casting himself as the decider and the boss, he made it so. He performatively made it so. He does know what he’s doing in his construction of reality.
ROSE: Trump has brought that same deliberate construction of reality to immigration, Young says. And for a big share of the country, it’s working.
Joel Rose, NPR News, Washington.
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