Combating the Nativist Narrative

Week of September 11, 2023

Impeached Texas GOP Attorney General Secures Another Anti-Immigrant Ruling from Judge Andrew Hanen:

Ending the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program has been a top priority for the corrupt Attorney General of Texas. As with other anti-immigrant lawsuits, he’s relied on anti-immigrant federal judges to achieve that goal. One of Paxton’s go-to judges is Andrew Hanen. In 2016, as another Paxton/Hanen case was heading to the Supreme Court, America’s Voice wrote a post linking to a law review article by Law Professor Anil Kalhan, “Judicial Truthiness”: Who Said It, Donald Trump Or Judge Hanen?, which also pointed out the aggressively anti-immigrant political rhetoric from Hanen. Paxton has been the main purveyor of the anti-immigrant judicial pipeline, which runs from federal district court judges like Hanen to the ultra-right wing Fifth Circuit, then up to the GOP justices on the Supreme Court. Paxton and his ilk don’t want solutions. Instead, they want to inflict pain on immigrants, including the 600,000 DACA recipients around the country. When Democrats controlled the United States House of Representatives, they passed the Dream and Promise Act in both 2019 and 2021. The Senate did not hold votes on that legislation. Importantly, even with Hanen’s ruling, DACA renewals and Advanced Parole applications are still being accepted as we await the next steps in the Fifth Circuit. More here.

COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Our America’s Voice colleague Yuna Oh summed up the situation: “As a DACA recipient, it is infuriating to always be told I don’t belong, as this ruling does…DACA recipients are parents, homeowners, leaders, and caregivers.” She added, “We are part of the American identity, whether the GOP recognizes it or not.” Zuleima Dominguez, a DACA recipient, and lead organizer at Make the Road New York: “As a current DACA recipient with loved ones who have been waiting to apply for this program, I know that this ruling puts the livelihoods of hundreds of immigrant youth across the country under attack. We have lived with immense uncertainty and as pawns in political games for years. Once again, today, an extremist judge has done the bidding of extreme MAGA politicians to try to rob us of our future.” More from United We Dream here and more reactions here.

As Congress returns to session, so do the seemingly endless nativist committee hearings:

With the first week back in session, the House Republican Majority held three separate Congressional hearings this week. All three of the hearings relied on the same false nativist narratives about fentanyl and the supposedly “open border” as well as forums to normalize hate and white nationalist conspiracy theories that have characterized the repeated hearings that have been the obsession of the House Majority. The hearing in the House Committee on Education & the Workforce is a blaring example. The Committee does not have jurisdiction over immigration or border-related issues, but that did not stop Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) from holding a hearing to be able to demagogue the issue. He opened and closed the hearing amplifying the white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy theory. His colleagues described immigrants in other dangerously dehumanizing terms like “suicidal” and “literally destroying our country.” The House Majority also invited two witnesses who are aligned with Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups. 

COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: These hearings were not about advancing solutions or improving the lives of working families but advancing pernicious, nativist misinformation. Throughout the hearings, Democratic Members repeatedly made this point. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) provides one good example from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing as he expertly framed the harmful politics at play, naming the extreme concentration of wealth, not our immigrant neighbors, as the urgent problem facing working families, warning against "dangerous rhetoric that fuels racial and prejudice conspiracy theories."

Republicans use 9/11 anniversary to demonize migrants by fearmongering about terrorist attacks:

Many Republicans used Monday to wildly speculate about the likelihood of an imminent terror attack committed by a foreign actor, contrary to the assessment of DHS  As we have noted before, while we should take national security concerns seriously, Republicans' assessment of this is overhyped and out of date. The fearmongering about migrants being a terror threat isn’t about a concern for public safety, but an ugly strategic racist political attack. This cynical politics was on full display at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday. Prompted by a clickbait CNN headline from two weeks ago, Reps. Jim Jordan and Tom McClintock penned a letter that asserted their disdain for actual evidence stating, “even if” the migrants in question “were screened, the Administration’s open-border policies still has created a national security threat to all Americans.” Such claims of  “open borders” policies are disinformation that empowers bad actors and sow confusion in the region. Jordan and McClintock are more interested in their sham impeachment push and strategic xenophobia, and their fig leaf of national security isn’t hiding much.  

COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: These political attacks have nothing to do with actually combating urgent terror threats. Nothing is more telling of this fact than Rep. McClintock opening at Thursday’s hearing, where he peddled a version of the great replacement conspiracy theory, a racist idea that has inspired multiple domestic terrorist attacks over the last few years. DHS Secretary Mayorkas confirmed that this behavior “fuels” the threat the nation is facing. But McClintock is not alone, in the Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene amplified the white nationalist  “invasion” conspiracy from the Congressional dais. Meanwhile, there are literal neo-Nazis marching in the streets, arrests, convictions, and deadly terrorist attacks, but there is more interest in nativist demagoguing than actually confronting this urgent threat to public safety.   

POLITICS UPDATES 

• UT Sen:  On Wednesday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) announced that he will not seek reelection to the Senate. The 2012 Republican presidential nominee doesn’t appear to be set to ride off to a quiet retirement just yet, using the moment for vocal criticism of the current direction of his party and releasing an unanswered text message he sent to Sen. Mitch McConnell a head of January 6 warning of the active plans to violently storm the Capital. But once publicly chided by Donald Trump for a “maniacal” stance of “self-deportation,” as costing him critical votes, Romney is now marginalized by that same man who led the turn in the GOP stance on immigration largely towards white nationalist conspiracies. The moment here illustrates the devolution of the party into dangerous extremism as they began to enthusiastically reject all the lessons of Romney’s loss a decade ago. A lot can and should be said about his alienation from a party he used to lead, but the GOP’s quick sprint past Romney down a dangerous path of nativism won’t slow any time soon.  

• OH Sen: Duty and Country, a superPAC affiliated with the Senate Majority PAC, is up with an ad in support of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) that reinforces the fiction that Republicans are offering real solutions to address the fentanyl crisis and that it can be addressed as a border issue. The ad touts that “Sherrod worked with Republicans to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and illegal drugs at the border. Brown wrote a bill signed by Donald Trump to increase funding for Border Patrol”. Their ad is critically wrong on two fronts. First, the fentanyl crisis is not a failure of border policy, but of drug policy. As Kemp Chester, Senior Advisor to the Director of National Drug Control Policy, testified before Congress saying, “ending the opioid crisis does not start, and it won’t end at the border.” Second, the ad grants legitimacy to Republicans on the issue, holding them up as having solutions on an issue that they daily demagogue with a pernicious nativist politics that distracts from finding real solutions. The ad backs Sen. Brown into a corner that operates off the opposition’s framing while failing to offer an alternative choice with one who names the real villains in the story alongside real solutions. The fentanyl crisis is becoming a more pressing and widespread concern by the day, and the American people deserve leaders offering them real solutions, not a politics of surrender. 

• Presidential primary:  The superPAC aligned with Ron DeSantis, Never Back Down, is up with a $1 million buy that has aired over 1,000 times, primarily across the early primary Iowa and New Hampshire markets. The ad praises DeSantis’ calls for “deadly force” and prominently highlights his “stone cold dead” line. This call for summary executions is not about addressing the fentanyl crisis, as DeSantis suggests, but the normalization of extrajudicial killings. Such talk courts vigilante racist political violence. Alongside this campaign slogan, DeSantis continues to double down on calls for military strikes in Mexico and the white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy theory as he makes this message the centerpiece of his campaign. These calls continue to receive applause, like a recent appearance on Hannity, which won’t go unnoticed by the rest of the Republican field. And regardless of his future electoral fortunes, others will continue to drive this deeply troubling shift forward. 

WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE 

Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent: 

• 155 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”

• 67 original tweets about “open borders,” with Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 84.1K Views, 1,295 Retweets, and 3,515 Likes.

• 26 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 103K Views, 577 Retweets, and 2,974 Likes.

• 17 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 127.2K views, 1,054 Retweets and 5,658 Likes.