From the Center for Immigration Studies

By Todd Bensman

Anyone wondering what kind of skullduggery is afoot to defeat the new Trump Administration’s imminent deportation operations need look no further than Bakersfield in Kern County in California’s Central Valley.

Surprise Border Patrol sweeps earlier this month – the first large-scale deportation operations anywhere since Trump’s election – picked up some 80 illegally present aliens but also kicked off an emotionally manipulative brand of media propaganda most Americans must call out and reject as operations spread across the nation soon.

I call it “Injustice Porn” – exploitation propaganda that the mass migration advocacy industry, with eager helpers in local, state, and national media, will employ to undermine the current broad political support for Trump’s coming national interior deportation initiative.

What Is Injustice Porn?

Injustice porn is “news” coverage and commentary that emphasizes hyperbolic, emotionally triggering government abuse allegations or migrant sobbing to generate headlines, spin up public outrage, and force government counteraction –before they can be proven false when no one cares much later. Take these few examples where highly inflammatory unverified claims and tragedy stories about immigration enforcement actions proved incredibly effective at undermining public policies before the truth emerged:

• The September 2021 allegations that white agents of the Border Patrol’s Horse Patrol Unit used their reins to whip black Haitian migrants during the Del Rio bridge crisis, claims determined to be without merit 11 months later. 
• U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s July 2019 allegation that migrants she met in Trump-era detention centers were forced to drink their water from toilets as part of an organized racist government campaign of “psychological warfare,” a claim strongly disputed by officials who pointed out that clean-water drinking fountains were integrated into apparatuses that also included toilets. 
• Allegations that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “death trap” floating marine barrier in the Rio Grande caused the drowning deaths of at least two immigrants upon its summer 2023 installation and that sharp metal gears between buoys wounded others. The allegations were deemed unfounded. 
• Allegations in 2018 that Trump’s administration was stuffing “kids in cages” – using video of practices that actually occurred during President Barack Obama’s administration. 
• Allegations in 2014 of widespread sexual misconduct by guards in a Texas-based family detention center, which were found to be without evidence by an investigative report. Detention center abuse allegations have proven an especially favored allegation for their ability to gin up widespread national outrage and government action before truth prevails. 

There are other popular forms of “injustice porn”, like news videos relating the “plight” of weeping deportee mothers and exploiting young children by staging them in ways engineered to tug at heartstrings. These kinds of “news” stories dehumanize migrants for political advantage in much the same way that makers of abused-pet support shelter commercials solicit donations on late-night TV.

An example of this came Monday, as inadmissible aliens with appointments to enter the U.S. through the unlawful CBP One port interview scheme were disappointed to learn that the program had been cancelled by the new administration. Print and broadcast coverage led with the tears of a Colombian migrant.

Accounts of hardworking illegal immigrants who kept their noses clean until the deportation bill finally came due are ever a favorite of the injustice porn industry, the telltale sign being that the storytellers rarely attempt to verify anything they’re told and accept all statements of fact as axiomatic.

Injustice porn propaganda is likely afoot when human rights and migrant advocates, UN agencies, and the news media put forth visuals and arguments that favor their agendas, without evidence. For instance, another favorite to forestall imminent deportations is to claim extreme widespread violence, hunger, and probable death await deportees in home nations. Many of these kinds of claims fall apart with even the mildest of factchecking and are usually dead wrong. (See House Envy: The Unacknowledged Real Motivation Behind Guatemala’s Mass Migration to the American Border, CIS February 2020; and Video: US Enabling Mass Asylum and Humanitarian Permit Fraud at the Southern Border, May 2023).

Which brings us back to the Border Patrol El Centro Sector’s Kern County “Return to Sender” operation as a foreshadowing indicator that the injustice porn industry is gunning the motor again and has released the emergency brake.

A Harbinger of Propaganda to Come

It’s unclear how the Border Patrol in the Kern County was able to get away with operations while President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas were still in office. But once unmarked Border Patrol cars, sweeps of Home Depots and farmlands began, the “injustice porn” machine sparked up for days without end.

At demonstrations and on local news, out came the familiar hyperbolic allegations without evidence as local media gave full unchecked voice to illegal alien protection advocates who claimed the operation was “an abuse of power,” “racial profiling”, and had “terrorized” the whole valley without justification. They vowed investigations and lawsuits to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

Frightened, terrorized children, the advocates alleged, felt compelled to hide at home rather than go to school. They got school employees like middle school teacher Belen Carrasco to assert that “students are scared”.

One child of about six years old was photographed carrying a pink sign that read in English: “My family picks your fruit!!!” – as though she’d written it herself rather than that someone else posed the cute little girl with the sign to gin up animosity against federal agents doing their normal work.

Another unverified claim that got uncritiqued air time for days on end was that the arrests had created a worker shortage that was damaging the local economy.

Like clockwork when the injustice porn machine churns media stories, out came local elected leaders promising to protect the illegal immigrants at all costs, undermining federal efforts to enforce immigration law.

One incident, when agents flattened the tire of a U.S. citizen to keep him from fleeing in his vehicle and then arrested his passenger on a warrant for human smuggling, especially outraged the activists, some of whom promised lawsuits.

Eventually, the ACLU showed up to investigate how the agents conducted themselves.

“What (agents) have done is terrorize communities and profile people who look brown, who look undocumented and who look like farmworkers”, said ACLU lawyer Rosa Lopez. “There was a lot of terror – or just fear – that trickled into kids not going to school”.

Now that Trump is in office with a strong mandate to return to normal detention and deportation activity, Americans need to recognize injustice porn when it targets them. They must call it out as manipulative, exploitative, and often outright false. They must begin to noisily reject injustice porn, to fact-check it, and to urge elected leaders and one another to blunt its impact.