Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump campaigning in Eagle Pass, Texas, alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border on Feb. 29, 2024 (Photo credit: Eric Gay, Associated Press)

By Melissa del Bosque

As the 2026 midterm election looms, the Trump administration is up to its usual tricks. The U.S.-Mexico border is one of the favorite tools of the MAGA-sphere for ginning up imaginary foes to rile up its base— whether it be migrant caravans or “invaders.” Fox news reported recently about an “ominous warning” from DHS about a migrant caravan in Honduras heading north, and border residents are reporting that ICE and CBP are ratcheting up their aggressive behavior — no doubt searching for a point of conflict that right-wing content creators and the White House can seize upon with just two weeks left until election day, and Trump’s approval ratings plummeting. It’s no accident that Border Patrol agents allowed content creators from Turning Point USA to embed with them last week as they confronted border wall protestors in Lochiel, Arizona, firing on them with pepper balls and tear gas.

It’s a bad movie we’ve unfortunately seen again and again. We wrote about this right-wing border theater extensively at The Border Chronicle during the Biden era. The MAGA movement, using the border as its discontent-creation backdrop, built a massive right-wing propaganda machine that worked very effectively in 2024 and helped Donald Trump get elected a second time. And now the Trump administration is at it, once again. Only, this time portraying the border as under invasion just doesn’t hit the same way it used to with American voters. Not with the administration declaring a national emergency on the streets of Washington D.C., Memphis, Minneapolis, and other American cities then unleashing thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents—with camera crews in tow— to create right-wing content as the heavily armed agents, looking like something from a war zone, target, persecute, and even kill residents.

The whole country is now getting the border treatment. Let’s see how that works for Trump and MAGA in November.

This Week in The Border Chronicle:

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