A New Era of Border Theater
It only took 30 years and the help of the Democratic Party to get here.

For several days, I’ve been mulling over how to write about Trump’s inauguration. I don’t want to be blindsided by his firehose of lies or unwittingly amplify his intimidation tactics. Plenty of media coverage has already portrayed Trump and his reprehensible cabinet members as political geniuses. Take Stephen Miller: he’s nothing more than a garden-variety Machiavellian operator willing to suck up to a strongman to attain power.
I don’t think Trump won this election with a God-given mandate, as he would have you believe. Rather, the Democrats simply lost. There are probably several reasons why. In my decades as a border journalist, I have written about the Republicans’ anti-immigrant initiatives, many of which were defeated by grassroots coalitions with little help from the Democratic establishment. This might have something to do with why some Latinos, especially at the border, voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all.
On Thursday, Todd will have more reporting from the border and analysis of Trump’s executive orders. One of these orders, which took effect immediately on Monday, put an end to the CBP One phone app. Rolled out in 2023, the app enabled people to legally apply for asylum in the U.S. Trump will also reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which means that border communities in Mexico will once again host large migrant camps filled with people who are stuck in legal limbo. And there is now another emergency declaration at the border to deploy the military. Trump did this in 2018 before the midterm elections, and soldiers spent most of their time stringing the border wall with razor wire. In short, there will be a lot to unpack in the coming days, months, and years. On that note, we depend on you, dear readers and podcast listeners, to keep the lights on. So please consider becoming a paid subscriber today to support our work as we untangle this mess of contradictory messages and actions at the border under Trump 2.0.

Ever since Donald Trump came gliding down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy to Neil Young’s “Rocking in the Free World,” (and without Young’s consent) we’ve been subjected to MAGA’s nonstop political theater. Trump’s role as U.S. president is the worst of American reality TV, with life-and-death consequences. And far more dangerous anti-democratic players have consolidated power on Trump’s coattails.
In the next four years, the U.S.-Mexico border region will serve as a main stage for MAGA propaganda. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has already built a multibillion-dollar Hollywood lot for the MAGA Ministry of Propaganda, called Operation Lone Star, complete with soldiers, squalid detention jails, a kangaroo court system, miles of razor wire, and military Humvees.
Expect to see much of Trump’s show take place in Texas, where the cast is already assembled, and the sets are already built. We spent the last four years watching the Right’s Invasion series, rolled out by Trump allies, including Ken Cuccinelli and Russ Vought.
In 2025 we’ll be presented with more autocratic content creation, which will be disseminated through social media platforms controlled by billionaires. To hold our attention, the programming will require many antagonists (a.k.a. enemies of the people), which will include immigrants, journalists, activists, educators, scientists, and so on.
When it comes to effective political strategy, “it’s good to have an enemy,” George Birnbaum, a U.S. consultant for authoritarians, told the BBC in 2023. Birnbaum helped Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán come to power. He was mentored by Arthur Finkelstein, a Republican political consultant who helped Richard Nixon win the 1972 presidency. Finkelstein wrote in a 1970 memo, “One should … try to polarize the election around that issue that cuts best in your direction, i.e. drugs, crime, race in New York State.”
In this case, that issue for the MAGA movement is immigrants and the border. Especially jarring about Trump’s second term are its many echoes of the past and how we arrived at this moment. Republicans, time after time, have demonized immigrants as a wedge issue to polarize Americans, win elections, and consolidate power. It often ends badly for them, but then Democrats further the Republican agenda anyway.
A Tactic 30 Years in the Making
Former governor Pete Wilson’s “They Keep Coming” 1994 political ad used the same racist, xenophobic messaging that we saw in thousands of ads run during the 2024 election cycle and repeated by Trump. Wilson, a Republican, won the election, but his immigrant fearmongering and promoting Proposition 187 ended his political career. It also spurred the formidable rise of Latino political power in California and turned the world’s fifth-largest economy solidly blue.
It’s often noted that Wilson won his election, but Republicans lost the battle. But not enough is written about how President Bill Clinton, as a reaction to this anti-immigrant movement, signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA), which paved the way for the mass detention and deportation system that we have in 2025—the one that Trump talks about so ominously. When it comes to mass deportations, Democrats have excelled over Republicans. During Trump’s first term he deported 1.5 million, a fraction of the nearly 5 million that Obama deported during his two terms in office, which earned him the moniker “deporter in chief.”
President Obama’s harsh enforcement was a response to yet another Republican anti-immigrant movement that coalesced around Arizona’s SB 1070, which spurred several copycat bills across the country, proliferated by the corporate-led American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
As a journalist in Texas, watching from afar, I wondered how long it would take for the anti-immigrant initiative to arrive in our state. For years, it had been rejected by Republicans like former governor George Bush, and his political adviser Karl Rove, who viewed it as bad for their campaign supporters who relied on undocumented and underpaid workers.
And then we had Trump in 2016, who seized on the border wall as a winning political strategy and fired up the old anti-immigrant messaging machine again, labeling people migrating from Mexico as “rapists” and “criminals.”
By then, Abbott and his lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, were on board with the political strategy. They have fully embraced MAGA and mass deportation politics, and it’s unclear how industries in Texas, from agriculture to construction, are going to weather the state’s spiral down the MAGA rabbit hole.
And so on every occasion in the last 30 years, Republicans have chosen demonizing immigrants as a political strategy. On each occasion, they’ve lost miserably and, in the process, spurred the growth of a powerful political movement of Latinos and allies who push back against the racism. This happened in California in the 1990s and in Arizona in the 2010s.
Latinos for Trump?
Why did some Latinos vote for Trump, especially along the border in Texas? One reason could be the repeated failures of establishment Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party is the most confounding player in border theater, because the party’s done more to help the MAGA agenda than hinder it. The Democrats refused to challenge Trump’s anti-immigrant invasion narrative and furthered the Republican anti-immigrant agenda while pledging to do the opposite. At this point, the mass deportation system is a bipartisan creation. We saw this again during the Biden administration, when in reaction to Trump’s noxious anti-immigrant agenda, President Biden restricted asylum and gave ICE and Customs and Border Protection the biggest budget in history.
After 30 years, it should be crystal clear to Democrats that it’s time to try something radically different. This means building a new vision, a new narrative that isn’t fear based, one that includes all Americans, and that embraces the many strengths of border communities. For Republicans, the border will never be secure enough. Fearmongering about immigration is too useful a political tool for winning Republican primaries and for riling up the base. Border “chaos” is an entrenched industry now that employs thousands of people and generates billions for corporations. It also makes for valuable content creation and political messaging.
Reading this 1995 article in the Los Angeles Times, I’m taken by how organizers behind Proposition 187 wanted to use the anti-immigrant initiative as a catalyst to form a broader coalition, one that, among other things, would “abolish the federal government and its taxing authority, restrict citizenship largely to those ‘born of an American,’ change the nation’s official name to ‘America’ and strip foreign nationals of most rights.”
It turns out their goal took 30 years to achieve. The anti-immigrant agenda is the Trojan horse that has allowed anti-democratic forces to consolidate their power under Trump’s second term and attempt do away with everything from women’s rights to our democracy. I propose a new Project 2025 to reject the fear and build a new narrative around our collective strengths as a diverse democracy. It’s time for a new script, and for Democrats to finally get the message.
Isn’t it interesting how much money Abbott has for building a migrant camp. I bet that will comfort everyone in Texas the next time the electrical grid fails and they either have no heat or no AC.
The show of power is far more important to Abbott and Trump than actual results. Abbott's prolonged border "inspections" snarled up the delivery of auto parts for months with no big busts. The day that there is no guacamole for the Super Bowl may wake up the masses to the fact that each country has bargaining chips.