The second Trump administration has opened with a barrage of sweeping immigration orders: suspension of protections for asylum seekers, removal of legal status for nearly 1 million Temporary Protected Status holders, and the sharpening of digital surveillance dragnet that tracks both immigrants and political dissenters. Now, thanks to a 1789 wartime law, the administration has ensnared legal residents, military veterans, and U.S. citizen children. Most recently it has sent Venezuelan migrants to dangerous El Salvador prisons on evidence as flimsy as a tattoo.
Yet, despite this blatant assault on core democratic values, Trump’s approval ratings on immigration remain positive — even as polls consistently show overwhelming support for pathways to citizenship over mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for years.
As baffling as this disconnect may seem, the reasons are clear. The immigration fight isn’t just happening in courtrooms or legislative halls — it’s unfolding in the digital town square, where public perception is shaped long before policies are debated. For years, right-wing media and multi-million-dollar ad campaigns have redefined immigration as a crisis, bombarding the American people with fear-based messaging to justify extreme policies. Sadly, the propaganda seems to be working — not just on the public, but on philanthropy itself.
Understandably, Trump’s eagerness to target his political foes has made some grant makers hesitant to engage. But funder reluctance to invest in pro-immigrant digital communications and paid media has created a dangerous vacuum that the far right methodically fills with disinformation and manufactured fear. With each passing month of this asymmetric information war, public discourse shifts further from pragmatic solutions toward a vision of America where immigrants are vilified and authoritarian control is normalized.
The Disinformation Machine
The far right and its allies have outspent, out-messaged, and out-organized progressives on immigration for nearly a decade. From 2018 to 2024 the right spent nearly $800 million on immigration ads compared with $125 million on the left. In the 2024 election alone, right-wing candidates and groups spent more than five times as much on immigration-related broadcast ads as Democratic candidates and groups.
In the same year, Fox News, the Daily Caller, and other media outlets on the right increased anti-immigrant coverage by 146 percent — generating 176.4 billion impressions and an estimated $5.5 billion in earned media value, according to research by Catalyze/Citizens, the 501(c)(4) arm of Immigration Hub, which I co-lead.
Immigration raids are now being filmed and staged for TV, with the Department of Homeland Security coordinating with Fox News and even Dr. Phil to turn mass arrests into meme-like entertainment. The agency even launched a $200 million ad campaign featuring Secretary Kristi Noem thanking President Trump for closing the border.
On social media, Elon Musk has personally fueled anti-immigrant hysteria, posting more than 1,300 times about noncitizen voting and border conspiracies and racking up 10 billion views. Musk’s social media platform X has become a breeding ground for aggressive anti-immigrant propaganda, with more than 903,000 negative immigration mentions reaching 10.6 billion people just last year. Right-wing podcasters play a part as well, further amplifying those anti-immigrant messages and shaping what Fox News host Jesse Watters calls a “21st-century information warfare campaign.”
A study we conducted in 2023 with Blackbird.AI found that bots and coordinated online networks played a key role in disseminating these narratives across social media platforms, further distorting public perception and creating a false sense of consensus.
A Pro-Immigrant Media Strategy
To counter the right’s disinformation juggernaut, pro-immigrant messaging must be strategic, relentless, and funded to scale at the speed of modern media consumption. At the Immigration Hub, we developed and tested a four-part strategy by running thousands of pieces of paid pro-immigrant content on Meta, Google, and streaming TV platforms from 2018 to 2022. Our goal was to reach people identified as conflicted on immigration issues. A BlueLabs Analytics survey found that 57 percent of Pennsylvania residents who viewed our content opposed leaders who expressed extremist views and 70 percent agreed that “immigrants are good for our community.”
Here’s our approach, which we encourage others to replicate:
Move voters from awareness to persuasion to action. Like the far right, pro-immigrant advocates must build a sustained narrative that reinforces messages across platforms. A voter may see a playful TikTok or a moving immigrant story, then an article about a local immigrant-owned business and finally may hear a lawmaker echo the narrative on TV. The objective is to curate content via both paid and earned media that tells a sequenced, positive story about immigrant contributions to local communities and reaches audiences wherever they are.
Address concerns — don’t just counter fear. The extreme right exploits common fears: scarcity of resources, personal safety, and loss of agency or feeling overlooked. These fears must be replaced with reassurance: local stories highlighting immigrant entrepreneurs giving back to their communities, short-form videos and clips featuring immigrants making their communities safer, and paid content spotlighting balanced policy solutions that include both humane border security and pathways to citizenship. This shifts the conversation away from fear and toward the subtle recognition that the real problem isn’t immigrants — it’s inaction and hate.
Pump out content relentlessly. The extreme right wins by repeating its messages over and over again. Those on the other side need to do the same. That means flooding media platforms with daily pro-immigrant and anti-extremism content, and reinforcing it through TV, radio or podcasts, and paid content. It also means being ready to capitalize on critical news and other content, such as last weekend’s 60 Minutes segment exposing the brutal reality of indiscriminate deportations to El Salvador. With even conservative voices such as Joe Rogan and Ann Coulter pushing back on the administration’s immigration tactics, now is the time to expand this strategy across audiences.
This kind of layered exposure matters: As the Blackbird.AI study shows, frequent, coordinated content creates a sense of consensus — giving people a familiar framework to fall back on when forming opinions. Repetition isn’t noise; it’s how narratives take hold.
Show what’s possible. Pro-immigrant forces will succeed if they offer an alternative vision of a modern immigration system centered on citizenship and safety that empowers working families and fuels democracy. Simultaneously, it’s critical to expose how anti-immigrant leaders and policies undermine our shared values of opportunity, justice, human dignity, economic stability, and democracy. It’s the contrast between fear and possibility that moves people and gives them something worth standing up for.
A well-informed public that sees immigrants as neighbors, workers, and contributors is essential for democracy itself. A public misled by fear will support mass deportations, surveillance, and state-sponsored cruelty — especially when they’re presented as the only available options. Right now, only one side is controlling the narrative. Philanthropy has the power to change that, but only if it makes bold and sustained investments in the tools to fight back. That includes effective surround-sound communications campaigns that use paid and earned media on digital and traditional platforms — ideally featuring messengers such as business and faith leaders who don’t typically speak up for immigrants.
History is clear: Authoritarianism does not contain itself. As Trump dismantles our democracy to tighten his grip on power, every American family will pay the price. Ignore the plight of immigrants, and soon we’ll wake up to find we are next in line.
