The Lies That Kill

Anti-migrant campaigns are getting more and more dangerous

Immigrants have increasingly become the subject of immensely dangerous misinformation campaigns meant to paint vulnerable people in search of better lives as violent criminals, or worse. These efforts, these viral lies, dehumanize those in need and put them in immediate danger. The latest crusade over the last 48 hours has been so disgusting and brazen that it’s difficult to believe that anyone believes it. But far-right operative Benny Johnson, one of the conservative influencers who “unknowingly” took millions of dollars from Russia, is among those leading a campaign to say that migrants are going around eating pets. Yes, unfortunately you just read that correctly.

I normally wouldn’t even showcase this type of claim, because it’s so vile and inflammatory and very obviously untrue. But I want to look at it as part of a larger pattern. For decades, conservatives have been demonizing immigrants, and they’ve been using increasingly unhinged lies to do so. Unfortunately their lies have been so persistent, and their pipeline for getting their disinformation into the mainstream has been so successful, that even stories people should immediately dismiss out of hand are now sometimes believed, and are often amplified by conservative mass media outlets.

One notable example has been unfolding over the last few months. Throughout this summer, tweets, videos, and headlines have repeatedly claimed that migrants, specifically Venezuelan gangs, are taking over apartment complexes. Elon Musk even got in on the fake news. The idea seems to have initially popped up in Colorado, where, as the Colorado Sun writes that a “property management company running three apartment complexes blamed their dilapidated condition on a ‘takeover’ by the infamous gang Tren de Aragua, saying their property manager was too afraid to collect rent. A Fox News video showing armed men outside an apartment door fueled the fire. Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky blamed ‘failed border policies’ and helped a few residents move out of one of the apartments, then social media exploded.”

I’ve witnessed the social media explosion that’s followed this story, and I know many of you have too. But if you’ve been fortunate enough to miss it, the thrust has been viral videos (without a hint of evidence) claiming first-hand knowledge of this ‘infamous’ gang taking over Aurora, Colorado apartment complexes. What the takeover entails is never really spelled out, and why exactly the police have done nothing and the landlord has given up is not explained either. In lieu of facts, multiple “content creators” rely on tropes, anti-immigrant sentiments, and the assumption that the viewer already shares multiple negative assumptions about the whole situation.

The Aurora story eventually got so out of hand that elected officials like Republican Lauren Boebert were repeatedly spreading lies about these apartment complexes, outlets like the Daily Mail and New York Post were amplifying the landlord’s lies, and rumors spread that the Hells Angels were coming to beat back the gangs. The tenants then felt obliged to host a press conference where they reminded everyone that the absentee landlord was the problem, that he was the reason things were falling apart, not a gang invasion of their homes.

The Aurora police and multiple local elected officials have also tried to break through the noise. As the Denver Post wrote, “Aurora officials — and the properties’ residents — have said the unlivable conditions at the company’s properties were longstanding and the result of the company’s mismanagement, rather than an overwhelming gang presence. Aurora’s interim police chief on Friday said gangs had not ‘taken over’ one of the complexes.” The local paper goes on to say that only 10 members of this ‘infamous’ Venezuelan gang have been identified in the entire town. 10 people in a city of 400,000 people are known to be affiliated, according to the police. And Aurora is technically its own city, but it’s situated within the much larger Denver metro area. This is the supposed threat: 10 people in the Denver area. Plus, these gang members have been tied to just one crime this summer. One crime in the past four months. That’s it and that’s all.

And yet the narrative continues. The absentee landlord is now selling the property. Conservative media is using the sale to further their outright lies, with the NY Post again blaming this latest development on migrant gangs:

But let’s see what a local paper, one which does actual journalism, has to say. When you turn to the Denver Gazette you’ll see that, in fact, “Aurora officials agreed to drop all charges against the owner of the Aspen Grove apartment complex in exchange for selling the property” and, just in case you’re still unclear on the truth of the matter, “Officials agreed to drop dozens of charges against Zev Baumgarten for failing to maintain the property.”

According to the Colorado Sun, it was the property management company that first started this rumor back at the end of June when they sent a letter to the state’s Attorney General blaming Venezuelan gangs for what was very clearly the result of their own criminal neglect and gross disrespect of their tenants. But we also have to examine the media and its consumers – the people who have been all too willing to believe this story that makes very little sense if one thinks critically for even a moment. 

There are a dozen reasons to get to the bottom of this viral disinformation campaign and understand that the lies originate with the landlord. The first is that it’s not unique to Colorado. Tenants in Chicago appear to be experiencing an oddly similar campaign, with rumors of the same Venezuelan gang taking over a building:

In Chicago, just like Aurora, viral videos and social media posts suddenly popped up, only to be debunked by local journalists. As Block Club Chicago, a local publication, writes “There is no evidence a group of migrants took over a Washington Park apartment complex Monday, a false claim that went viral on social media and was amplified by Elon Musk.” Another local journalist went over to the neighborhood and talked to folks living in and near the building. Amando Sanchez posted the videos of his conversations with residents and said, “The people we talked to seemed to really welcome migrants living in the building and stressed the migrants living there had not taken over the building.”

This is the key. The reality of people welcoming migrants into their communities is exactly what landlords and conservative forces want to be obscured in this hazy deluge of viral misinformation. It won’t surprise any of us that there are people out there using new media and new methods to try to divide and conquer us. But this playbook is really just a slightly altered version of one that’s been used for decades now: concoct absurd lies about immigrants and use any sources available to both launder and amplify them. When I had a congressional internship about 10 years ago I would be sitting at that desk receiving inane calls about ISIS bringing ebola over the Mexican border. Yes, I heard that exact conspiracy multiple times. And these callers were from New Hampshire, so obviously border politics were practically knocking on their door.

In all seriousness, while stories of gangs taking over buildings with no push-back from police or claims about immigrants eating your pets are all racist nonsense, the ramifications are unfortunately very real. In some cases the result is violent attacks against individual migrants. In other cases it’s a broader shift of the Overton window that enables, for example, real vigilante gangs of white men at the US-Mexico border to steal water left out for immigrants and perform some version of ‘citizens arrests’ and kidnap people seeking a better life.

At the highest level, this relentless parade of migrant fear stories that are made up and spread around has shifted the window so far that Democrats are now attempting to outflank Republicans on ‘border security.’ I wrote about the Democrats shifting approach to immigration recently, and on the immense danger it poses to migrants and to all of us, so I won’t dwell on it here, but I will briefly say that ceding the narrative to Fox News, Breitbart, and the right is a slippery slope towards competing over who can enact harsher border policies and scapegoat migrants more effectively.

Photo by Roi Dimor on Unsplash

It’s difficult to imagine that the nonsensical videos claiming Venezuelan gangs have taken over buildings from Colorado to Chicago or tweets about Haitians suddenly deciding to eat pets would go so viral and be so readily believed without the years of anti-immigrant propaganda that so much of this country has been steeped in. Each insidious story builds on the momentum of the last. We’ve seen how much the media and an alarming wide range of people have accepted an increasingly dangerous framing of every migrant story in recent years. Even when the topic has been poor migrants on the streets of New York, or being shipped by Ron DeSantis from Florida to various cities around the country, the framing has still tended towards portraying people arriving here with nothing and sleeping on the streets as dangerous.

But the dangerous people aren’t those arriving here in search of a better life, it’s the politicians willing to use human beings as props in their stunts. The dangerous people aren’t immigrants without housing, it’s media figures willing to craft and spread narratives that they know might get people killed. The ones that pose a danger to all of us are landlords and billionaires, not asylum seekers and refugees. As a rule of thumb human beings with little more than the shirts on their backs are infinitely less dangerous than those willing and eager to dedicate themselves to the dehumanization of others.

It’s necessary to challenge the power of those who readily dehumanize the vulnerable among us, whether the stigmatized are migrants or the homeless or trans folks or others. Combating dehumanization involves creating and supporting alternative media, building community organizations to care for one another, and developing the power to demand policy change based on care and compassion rather than hate and division. But we also need to ask one another why people are prone to believing outrageous stories and lies that only serve to spread fear. Why do folks believe videos with no evidence that promote outlandish claims with the sole intention of getting us angry at the vulnerable? Who benefits when we're afraid of migrants and panicked over things they aren’t actually doing?

In other words, simultaneous with building the infrastructure of change we need to foster changes in how we see one another. Ultimately, that interior change can make us far harder to divide, and far harder to conquer. The antidote to division and fear-mongering is solidarity, and what the ruling class hates is seeing us collectively build that muscle. That’s why they constantly stoke division, and why we must constantly respond with a growing and overwhelming reaction of solidarity with one another and with oppressed people, be they at our border, in the streets, or on the other side of this little globe.