I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” the authoritarian aspirant tweeted, following his Friday rally at the Aurora Gaylord. “We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.” Over the rest of the three-paragraph screed, he promised to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel migrants, a law which was last used to intern 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The tweet, issued last week by the former president of the United States, should have shocked me. Eight years ago, it would have shocked me. Even four years ago, the full-throated anti-immigrant threat might have elicited some twinge of surprise from me. But here, now, in October 2024, I barely blinked.
In my work monitoring extremist groups and countering disinformation with progressive organizations around the country, the increasing temperature of anti-immigrant sentiment on the right-wing has become the background radiation of my professional life. While those who are understandably wrapped up in horse-race coverage of the election, living or dying by every new poll, might take it for granted that Republicans are intentionally stoking concerns around immigration to benefit themselves at the ballot box, what we are seeing right now is beyond the traditional conservative disdain for immigration – and I believe it has been ginned-up to serve a purpose not just at the ballot box, but beyond it.
If Donald Trump is not declared the winner of the November 5 presidential election, there is ample reason to believe that he and the Republican Party will once again refuse to accept the results, will once again attempt to spin a Big Lie, and will once again attempt to take by other means what the voters would not give them. But it won’t be the same Big Lie this time. This time, if Donald Trump loses, they’re going to blame immigrants. And a network of conservative organizations and elected officials are seemingly preparing to do just that.
The writing has been on the wall. Whether it’s about non-citizen voting or “migrant crime” (in reality, both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans) or the white nationalist boogeyman of the Great Replacement Theory, demonizing and fear-mongering around immigration – legal or not – has become a central tentpole of the right-wing coalition.
In many ways, that’s not a new phenomenon. Immigration is a perennial fixture of American politics, something which has been at or near the center of our national debate off and on for the better part of 30 years. Republicans relentlessly attack Democrats on the issue, and Democrats relentlessly relent to their attacks. But something has changed in the last four years. Through almost the entirety of that 30-year debate, though increasing immigration was a minority opinion for much of that time, the country’s desire to increase immigration steadily climbed – from 1993 to 2020, the approval trend line was solidly up – and then it fell like a stone.
This summer, Gallup released a poll showing that 55% of Americans want to see immigration – not illegal immigration, all immigration – decreased: the highest figure the pollster has documented since 2001. 20-plus years of improving sentiment around immigration levels were wiped off the board in three years (in better news, the same Gallup poll shows that Americans overall still have a positive view of the concept of immigration – despite also wanting it decreased – but that the majority of Republicans do not).
What happened? I’m sure academia and punditry will offer their own answers at some point, but it is reasonable to assume, at least in part, that increasingly vitriolic anti-immigrant rhetoric from Donald Trump and the Republican Party has had a measurable impact on public sentiment.
For those accustomed to tuning out Republican complaints about immigration as white noise, it may have been easy to miss how much more extreme those complaints and claims have become.
The actual facts are clear. According to the Pew Research Center, a leading producer of reliable estimates of the undocumented immigrant population for decades, the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is between 11 and 12 million people. Corroborating the Pew figures, the nonpartisan Center for Migration Studies revealed its own latest estimate last month, pegging the figure at 11.7 million. The Department of Homeland Security agrees. Even at the high end of these estimates, the current population of undocumented immigrants is down from the 2005 high of 12.2 million.
Despite that broad consensus, Republican claims about illegal immigration have left the realm of reality in the last four years.
“We’re talking upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million [undocumented immigrants],” Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio claimed earlier this year. Conservative think-tanker Merrill Matthews, meanwhile, has promoted the outlandish claim that the undocumented population “roughly doubled” during the first three years of the Biden administration. There is no evidence to support either claim. And Donald Trump is promising to deport 25 million “illegal immigrants” if he takes office – almost two-and-a-half times as many undocumented immigrants as are actually in the country.
They are not making these claims because they believe them. They’re making them in hopes that they will serve Republican electoral ends.
Now, with an election bearing down on them, it’s time for the rubber of those hopes to meet the road of reality. Much of the anti-immigrant furor stoked in the last four years was inflamed in the belief that greater concern around immigration would result in more votes for Republicans at the ballot box. And it might. But securing enough votes to win is only one of their strategies.
A network of conservative organizations and Republican elected officials appear to be consciously laying the groundwork for the new Big Lie, should it be needed: that undocumented immigrants voted in large enough numbers to sway the election.
The most important thing to understand about these claims is that they are based on – quite literally – nothing. Despite current efforts by the Republican Party to whip up concerns, or pretenses, with the issue of non-citizen voting, the actual phenomenon is statistically nonexistent. It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in all 50 states, and state election officials have multiple systems in place for confirming voter eligibility as part of the registration and vote tallying processes.
When claims of non-citizen voting have been investigated, they have come up almost entirely empty. After the 2016 election, the pro-voting rights Brennan Center for Justice analyzed 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions and found only 30 cases of suspected – not even confirmed – non-citizen voting, equivalent to 0.0001%. At the very highest end of the spectrum, a North Carolina audit after the 2016 election found that the percentage of ballots cast by ineligible voters in that state might have been as high as 0.01% – a number which, like the Brennan Center’s 0.0001%, rounds out to 0%.
Despite these facts, multiple well-funded right-wing organizations with national reach appear to be laying the groundwork for disputing the election with claims that non-citizens voted in large enough numbers to sway it. The Election Integrity Network, run by Cleta Mitchell – a Republican activist and attorney best known for being one of the participants on the phone call in which Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough votes for him to win – is using its reach and resources to promote fears of non-citizen voting around the country. Just last month, Mitchell testified in a Republican show hearing about the topic on Capitol Hill, where she claimed that new laws to prevent non-citizens from voting are necessary because of the “open border policies” of “Border Czar Vice-President Harris.”
Another national group, the Only Citizens Vote (OCV) Coalition, with which Mitchell is also involved, has banded together election conspiracist groups from all 50 states into one major election conspiracy engine. This year, most of OCV’s time and resources are being dedicated to pushing the idea that “Democrats want non-citizen voting.”
Then there’s United Sovereign Americans, a far-right legal center working to sow chaos in the election by raining litigation down on election officials in state after state, including Colorado’s Jena Griswold, challenging official voter rolls. It’s part of an explicit strategy to leave a trail of claims which they can point back to, if Trump is not declared the victor, as cause in civil rights lawsuits which they hope will prevent states from certifying the election.
But It’s not just PACs and outside groups stoking the flames around the nonexistent problem, it’s Republican elected officials at the highest level.
Last month, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, almost shut down the federal government as a stunt to pass the SAVE Act – federal Republicans’ legislative vehicle for keeping the issue of non-citizen voting alive – which would make non-citizen voting illegal federally. Which it already is. Meanwhile, Republicans in eight states are running ballot initiatives to make non-citizen voting illegal in those states, which it already is.
A more insidious strategy is playing out at the state level, though, with what looks a whole lot like premeditation.
Since the passage of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, it has been illegal for states to purge voters from the official voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Every governor and secretary of state in the nation knows this. And yet, starting late last month, Republican officials in at least two states started purging their rolls, as if they were begging for the Department of Justice to sue them. And, sure enough, it looks like that might have been the plan, because as soon as the DOJ sued them, the Republican administrations in Alabama and Virginia immediately turned the Department’s punch into a rope-a-dope, spinning the suits into claims that the Biden administration was trying to prevent them from removing non-citizens from their voter rolls. As Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin disingenuously put it, “Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.”
Like the strategy being pursued by United Sovereign Americans, this move by the governors appears designed not for use in the present, but for reference in the near future, when the warped version of events put forward by Youngkin & co can be heaped atop the pyre of dubious claims. The goal isn’t to win the lawsuits – Glenn Youngkin knows he’s breaking the law – the goal is to clog the system with so much sewage, so many doubts, that it cannot function properly.
In the vacuum left by the absence of a properly functioning system, it will likely fall to other apparatchiks to use that chaos and those doubts to submit false slates of electors, to line up the necessary allies on Capitol Hill, and, ultimately, to re-attempt what they failed to accomplish on January 6, 2021: getting Congress to certify a result at odds with what the voters voted for.
I can’t tell you how the whole plan will play out – we just don’t know yet – but I can tell you that it will be chaotic, and that chaos may be all they need. I can tell you that it will be better planned and better executed than the 2021 putsch. And I can tell you that the lion’s share of Republican elected officials already appear to be onboard.
I can’t tell you if it will work. It would be foolish to say it can’t, that it’s impossible, that these things don’t happen here. If the last eight years of American public life have taught us anything, it should be that it can, in fact, happen here. That it might soon happen here. And the only thing we can do at this point is wait, and hope, and stay vigilant – because, remember, this is what we can expect in the best case scenario. This is what we can expect if Donald Trump loses.
