One afternoon in mid-May, half a dozen day laborers were paid $20 each to parade in front of the White House in front of cameras, holding signs with slogans such as “I love Biden” and “I need a work permit for my family.”
The maneuver was orchestrated by Nick Shirley, a pro-Trump social media influencer who often asks migrants on camera if they support Democratic President Joe Biden or if they believe he made it easier for them to arrive in the United States.
“We want to get you to the White House,” Shirley told the men she recruited in a Home Depot parking lot, where day laborers often wait for work, in a video later posted on YouTube. “What (Biden) did for immigrants is very kind, right? Letting everyone in? So let’s show him and thank him.”
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Shirley, a 22-year-old with more than 318,000 followers on social media, is part of a new class of people supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and helping to shape the immigration debate as the debate heats up. election campaign.
His reporting from American cities and the southern border with Mexico portrays illegal immigrants as dangerous and a burden.
Biden took office in 2021 promising to reverse many of Trump’s restrictive border policies, but has faced record numbers of migrants caught illegally crossing the US-Mexico border during his term.
Although it is difficult to quantify the impact of influencers on the debate, immigration is a top electoral issue for voters and a central pillar of Trump’s campaign to regain the presidency in November.
About three-quarters of Republicans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in May said migrants in the United States “are a danger to public safety.” Independents, who could decide the next occupant of the White House, were divided on the issue.
While Shirley began making prank videos as a high school student in Utah and only recently began focusing on illegal immigration, other influential Trump supporters are more established and explicitly partisan.
One of the most prominent is Ben Bergquam, a self-described opinion journalist who hosts the television show “Law and Border” on the digital media platform Real America’s Voice and appears regularly on a show hosted by Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser.
Bergquam often links immigrants to crime, another of the dominant themes of Trump’s campaign, even though many academics who study the issue say there is no evidence to show that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans. in the country.
A Reuters reporter joined Bergquam during an April visit to New York, where he approached a group of men outside the Row NYC, a 1,331-room hotel in midtown Manhattan now used as a shelter for immigrants. He carried a tripod and a video camera, with a black “Trump 2024” cap clipped to his belt.
He smiled and laughed with several of the immigrants and exchanged stories with a Venezuelan about his trips to the Darién Gap, the jungle that covers the border between Colombia and Panama and one of the main routes for immigrants heading to the United States.
However, moments earlier, speaking on camera, the 41-year-old had adopted a less friendly tone, describing immigrants arriving illegally in the United States as an “invasion” and claiming they were causing an increase in violence.
That same day, at the gates of a second migrant shelter, Bergquam criticized Biden for allowing in immigrants unable to support themselves, including mothers with young children, and “young thugs on the street.”
MORE VIOLENCE?
Bergquam’s claim about violence is not supported by crime data in New York City, which has received more than 202,000 immigrants since the Republican-governed state of Texas began busing them from the border. south to Democratic-governed cities in 2022.
Although citywide felony arrests increased in 2022, they remained stable in 2023 and have decreased slightly in 2024, according to New York Police Department statistics.
Asked about the lack of evidence of an increase in violence, Bergquam, an Arkansas resident, said crimes committed by immigrants are underreported, and he blamed the NYPD’s policy of not questioning criminal suspects or to victims about their immigration status.
He said every crime committed by an illegal immigrant could be prevented with stricter policies.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Democratic-run cities purposely fail to document when crimes are committed by illegal immigrants to hide the problem and that Trump plans to launch the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. .
Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Muñoz said Americans want solutions to the country’s “broken immigration system,” but Trump and his political allies want “chaos and partisan politics.”
Reuters identified at least six social media influencers focused on immigration-related videos, who together have more than 1.4 million social media followers. His videos are posted on platforms such as YouTube, X, TikTok, Facebook, and Rumble.
The videos are shared frequently, which amplifies your message. In a Denver video from February, Shirley asked immigrants if they supported Biden and several responded yes. Shirley published it in X: “Confirmed: Migrants for Biden 2024.”
Elon Musk, owner of X who has 182 million followers, responded to a post highlighting Shirley’s report with an exclamation point.
Trump and Republicans have alleged that large numbers of noncitizens vote in federal elections and have pushed to pass laws banning the practice, even though it is already illegal and rare.
Right-wing media such as Fox News, the most watched cable news network in the United States, have featured some of the influencers’ videos and have aired interviews with at least three of them.
Shirley told Reuters that her content appeals to people who don’t normally watch news on television and appreciate her unpolished style.
“People my age say, ‘I had no idea this was happening,'” he said, referring to his migrant-focused videos.
He said he did not believe migrants living in the United States illegally would try to vote in November, but that “if they are given the opportunity to vote, they are going to vote for Biden, because he is the reason they are here.”
Asked whether he exploited people in videos like the White House stunt, he added: “I wanted to give migrants the opportunity to express their opinions.”
With information from Reuters
