Lloyd Barba, Ph.D., is a 2024-2025 PRRI Public Fellow who focuses on immigration and migration. He is also an assistant professor of religion and Latinx/Latin American studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Just hours after being sworn in as the 47th president, Donald Trump signed the Executive Order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” This, along with nine other executive orders regarding immigration enforcement signed that day, sought to establish the steps necessary for him to deliver on his campaign promises of mass deportation. Since then, the Trump administration has begun an aggressive communications campaign aimed at winning public support for mass deportations. This Spotlight Analysis examines Americans’ perceptions of immigrants, crime, and mass deportation in light of the Trump administration’s messaging efforts to link immigrants to crime.
As part of his initial actions on immigration enforcement, Trump rescinded a longstanding “sensitive locations memo” which offered some measures of protection against immigration enforcement actions being carried out at houses of worship, schools, hospitals and clinics, shelters, relief centers, and public rallies and demonstrations. Within Trump’s first week in office, his “Border Czar” Tom Homan dispatched federal authorities to sweep through neighborhoods, causing panic in immigrant communities — especially in high-density Latino neighborhoods. By the end of the seventh day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested a church founder with an active asylum case at an Atlanta-area Latino Pentecostal church.
At the same time, official government social media pages, along with right-wing news channels and influencers, saturated the media-scape with images announcing immigrant arrests with one common denominator: charges or convictions of a violent criminal past, as one Boston ICE agent put it “extremely violent offenders.” The official White House Instagram pinned a post of nine mug shots of men arrested by immigration enforcement across the country to the top of its page. Similarly, after posting only sparingly throughout 2024, the official ICE X account posted images and videos almost daily of its enforcement activities.
Additionally, in at least one arrest of a Haitian man in Boston, ICE brought along a Fox News crew to televise the arrest. To further spread news of the arrests of “violent alien criminals,” Homan joined forces with talk show personality and host Dr. Phil McGraw. During Homan’s operation in Chicago, McGraw (who has said he retired his license to practice clinical psychology years ago), used his X.com streaming channel “MeritStreet” to broadcast arrests and confront the apprehended, styled somewhat after the long-running reality TV show “Cops.”
Broadcasting these arrests conveys two core messages: first, that immigrants are dangerous, and second, that Trump is delivering on his promises by acting on his campaign slogan: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.”
The premise of this one-sided messaging linking immigrants to crime and suggesting a heightened need for immigration enforcement is not supported by empirical evidence. In fact, U.S.-born citizens commit crimes at far higher rates than undocumented immigrants. And contrary to public perception, sanctuary cities are safer and do not foster criminal activity.
The “migrant crime” narrative comes at a time in which public perception against immigrants is particularly negative among Republicans. According to the 2024 PRRI American Values Survey, 43% of Americans believe that immigrants increase crime rates in local communities. Notably, this view is far more prevalent among Republicans (73%) compared with 40% of independents and just 17% of Democrats. Further, among Americans who primarily trust far-right news sources, 84% share this sentiment, as do three-quarters of those who most trust Fox News (76%). By comparison, of those who do not watch TV news, 42% believe immigrants increase crime in local communities, and of those who trust mainstream TV news, even fewer, 29%, believe in a linkage between immigrants and crime in local communities.
The same survey shows that public opinion in favor of deportation increased by 10 percentage points from 21% in 2013, when question was first asked, to 31% in 2024. Further, according to a January 2025 New York Times-Ipsos poll, 87% of Americans favored deportations when asked about “immigrants who are here illegally and have criminal records.” That explains, in part, why White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s misleading claim that all undocumented immigrants are criminals will remain a consistent message from the Trump administration.
The perception of migrants causing crime may have influenced support for extreme immigration policies, such as mass deportation. Indeed, PRRI data shows that Americans are divided on a policy that would round up and deport undocumented immigrants, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military, with 47% in favor and 50% in opposition. Support is highest among Republicans (79%), compared with 47% of independents and just 22% of Democrats. Americans who most trust far-right news (91%) and Fox News (82%) are the most likely to favor militarized encampments, compared with 44% of those who do not watch TV news and 36% of those who primarily trust mainstream TV news. It is worth noting that those who get political information from television sources (54%) are significantly more likely to support this policy than those who get political information from social media (42%), or from newspapers (32%).
Anthropologist and author Leo Chavez examined how the use of terms such as “invasion” and the circulation of images of chaos at the border have stoked fear of immigrants in his books “Covering Immigration” and “The Latino Threat.” Now, the title of Trump’s executive order — “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” — along with current messaging being used by various media channels, influencers, and the new administration, draw upon some of the oldest media tropes about immigrants to create and maintain fear, as Chavez described. Beyond fear, however, these narratives of immigrant threat and crime are now shaping actual government policy and are likely to continue doing so.