Republicans have said Democrats must stop demonizing Donald Trump in the wake of an assassination attempt last weekend. But at the Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly demonized immigrants with language that’s been echoed by perpetrators of violence.
Trump and several other RNC speakers referred to unauthorized immigration as an “invasion” — “not figuratively, a literal invasion,” said Sen. Ted Cruz during a speech on Tuesday — a term also used by the man who killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.
“The way that Republicans are talking about immigration and immigrants is not just vile and un-American, but it is dangerous,” Rep. Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, told NOTUS. “They’ve really been accelerating the messaging that immigrants are criminals, immigrants should be feared and immigrants should be hated.”
“I can’t believe that as a country, we haven’t learned our lesson,” the Biden campaign co-chair added.
And “invasion” wasn’t the only rhetoric about immigrants thrown around at the RNC. Thomas Homan, the former and potentially future head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, referred to the situation at the border as “national suicide.” Multiple speakers suggested Democrats want people to come to the U.S. without legal authorization so they’ll become voters (noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections) and pushed ideas that brushed up against the “great replacement theory.” Many framed immigrants as a violent threat.
The language was fairly typical of Republicans in the Trump era. But the fact that it came as Republicans called for Democrats to take a softer tone stood out to many immigrant rights advocates.
In 2018, a man who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue first posted an anti-immigrant screed. In 2022, a shooter who killed 10 people targeted a grocery store in a predominantly Black community allegedly published a manifesto citing the “great replacement theory.”
“For almost a decade now, we have been ringing the alarm about just extreme rhetoric on immigration and immigrants because we’ve seen the real-life consequences of it,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the advocacy group America’s Voice.
After the El Paso shooting, then-President Trump rejected the idea that his language should be tied to the shooter’s. He hasn’t toned down his rhetoric since.
Advocates say such messaging forces their communities to live in fear.
“Unfortunately, I think that misinformation around migration has evolved into something darker and more dangerous in recent times,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge. “Obviously, immigrants have long been used as scapegoats for societal challenges.”
“This emergence of invasion rhetoric marks a real shift from traditional fearmongering to a fringe conspiracy theory that sees immigrants as an existential threat to our country,” she added.
Zachary Mueller, senior research director for America’s Voice, said the rhetoric is changing because it’s found a mainstream audience. It’s no longer a fringe theory — and there’s more money behind it.
“There has been a dehumanization and demonization of immigrants and vilification of [immigrants] for political ends in years past, but we are crossing into a different threshold where the main part of the Republican Party isn’t just about being anti-immigrant, they’ve adopted white nationals’ conspiracy theories and talking points that have led to political violence as a core messaging,” he said.
Mueller is part of the organization’s effort to track anti-immigrant messaging and has found that Republican-aligned campaign spending that discusses immigration in negative terms has risen significantly since last cycle. The researchers tracked $51 million for such ads for the entire year in 2020, but the number already has hit $241.5 million in 2024, Mueller said.
The advocacy group Immigration Hub also tracks spending on anti-immigrant messaging and found that in just a handful of states this year, spending on political advertising that touched on immigration from the GOP surpassed $80 million on television alone.
That idea that immigrants are a threat leads to violence, and not just against immigrants, said experts and advocates.
“Do you think a member of the KKK can tell the difference between a Puerto Rican, a Mexican, a Dominican, a Venezuelan?” former Rep. Luis Gutierrez said. “No, all he sees is a Latino. Someone brown, who crossed the border to sell drugs, to rape and pillage, because that’s what they say we do.”
“But we have to be nice,” Gutierrez added, commenting on the calls to back off Trump. “We have to be nice until they begin the deportations.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.