Central American Asylum Seekers' Caravans as a Political Act

Abstract

In the run‐up to the 2018 midterm elections news media were saturated with images of Central American immigrants traveling north in “caravans,” accompanied by images and metaphors of an “invasion of illegal aliens,” a commonly used xenophobic trope with a long history in the United States. Using a range of triggering terminology to instill fear in the population, President Trump and officials from his administration also warned the public that there were gang members, criminals, Middle Easterners, and possibly even terrorists among these asylum seekers. According to these officials, the Democrats or perhaps Venezuela might be behind these “caravans.” These tropes, broadcast nonstop in the news media, were meant to instill a sense of threat and insecurity among Americans. Amid the panic created, the Department of Homeland Security even issued an alarmist factsheet about the caravan, which included a list of the suspected nationalities in the caravan (from Somalia, India, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh among others), and the assertion that there were 270 individuals with criminal histories along the caravan route. The president regularly sent messages (via interviews with the media or his Twitter account), to a public already primed to fear immigrants, that crime and criminals were filtering through the southern border and that the invaders needed to be contained (statements he made throughout his term in office). Accordingly, the administration's response was “Operation Faithful Patriot,” which included the deployment of up to 15,000 active‐duty military troops to Texas, Arizona, and California. And even though the broadcasting of such alarmist declarations decreased dramatically immediately after the midterms, the commander‐in‐chief did order 5600 American troops to be deployed to the border, where they remained for months waiting for the “caravan” to arrive. The media spectacle might have been part of the election strategy because the secretary of Homeland Security dropped the name “Operation Faithful Patriot” on election day in 2018. Regardless, border authorities have used tear gas on the migrants who have tried to set foot on US soil to seek asylum.