The Long, Lethal History of Trump’s ‘Invasion’ Rhetoric

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm vote, Donald Trump issued a dire warning: The United States was facing an imminent invasion. He soon threatened to cut off aid to several countries that, in his telling, had allowed the coming aggression to begin on their soil. He demanded yet another country step up to help prevent the attack. He blamed his Democratic predecessors for “weak laws” that left the US vulnerable to hostile foreign forces. He vowed to use military force to “stop this onslaught” and defend the nation against “unknown Middle Easterners” and “criminals.”

But the coming invasion was, in fact, not an invasion at all. There were no military forces amassing to assault the United States. Nor was the president speaking about foreign armed groups potentially preparing an attack on American soil. What Trump called an invasion was a caravan of thousands of migrants, most of them fleeing widespread violence and poverty in Central America, that was making its way on foot through Mexico. Most likely hoped to apply for asylum upon reaching the US-Mexico border. In response, Trump warned he would cut off aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and urged Mexico to prevent the caravan from reaching the border.

Since 2015, when he announced his first presidential bid, Trump had built his political identity around a bellicose and often openly racist opposition to immigration. He campaigned on deporting millions of undocumented people and promised to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. In his first few months in office, he signed executive orders that reduced refugee resettlement and placed harsh entry restrictions on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries. His administration backed Congressional bills that, if passed, would have slashed legal immigration in half. He had long referred to immigrants as “criminals,” “animals,” and “predators,” but the normalization of invasion rhetoric marked a new level of hostility. Migrants, refugees, and would-be asylum seekers were, by the president’s logic, not people simply seeking refuge or economic stability. Rather, they were no different than a foreign military storming across the southern border.

Critics rushed to stress the danger of painting immigration as an invasion, but loyal Republicans and right-wing media jumped to drum up fear over the caravan, parroting the president’s rhetoric ad nauseam. That October alone, the word invasion came up on Fox News more than 60 times. Throughout a single day in early November, Fox News and Fox Business Network programs mentioned the caravan more than 80 times. Tucker Carlson, whose nighttime show was Fox’s third-most watched program that year, time and again warned millions of viewers of this supposed invasion. Speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox & Friends, Republican US Representative Steve Scalise said, “We have to treat this an invasion.” Ingraham herself delivered a monologue against “this invading horde,” telling her viewers that “leftists are aiding and abetting this invasion.”

The invasion rhetoric echoed two closely linked, decades-old conspiracy theories: the great replacement theory and the paranoid, debunked belief that white people are enduring a genocide. The first was popularized by the French philosopher Renaud Camus, whose 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement posits that liberal policymakers and global institutions have orchestrated a campaign of mass immigration to undermine white European populations through “genocide by substitution.” In the 1990s, a now-deceased neo-Nazi named David Lane, who was imprisoned at the time on a conspiracy conviction related to the 1984 murder of a popular Jewish talk radio host, helped spread the similar but unique white genocide myth through his prison writings. Building on German Nazi-era propaganda, that belief holds that mass immigration, low birthrates among white people, and interracial marriage, among other factors, are part of a plot to hasten the extinction of white populations. Unsurprisingly, believers in the great replacement theory and white genocide often blame Jews for the supposed anti-white plots.

As the right-wing meltdown over the caravan deepened in the fall of 2018, some Republicans began to blame prominent Jews for the crisis. Then US Representative Matt Gaetz posted a video on Twitter he claimed showed people handing out money to migrants in Honduras, questioning in the text of the post whether the Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a child, was bankrolling the caravan. Gaetz later admitted he’d mistaken the country — the video was from Guatemala — but his tweet had already reached millions of accounts. Among those who retweeted the post were Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s son, and several right-wing media figures with millions of followers online: the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, longtime conservative commentator Ann Coulter, and frequent Fox guest Sarah Carter.

More dangerous yet, hardline white nationalists and others on the far right quickly answered the implicit call to arms baked into invasion rhetoric. Anti-immigrant militias from around the US flocked to the southern border. On Oct. 27, 2018, less than two weeks after Trump first called the caravan an invasion, a neo-Nazi gunman named Robert Bowers stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and shot dead 11 Jewish worshippers. Bowers had previously complained on a far-right social media outlet that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish humanitarian organization, was responsible for bringing in “invaders that kill our people.” Around the same time, for nearly two weeks in late October and early November, a man named Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to several Democratic politicians — Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, among others — and Trump critics, including Holocaust survivor and liberal philanthropist George Soros.

After the midterm election on Nov. 6, Fox and others apparently forgot about the caravan just as quickly as they had made it a central talking point. But the invasion rhetoric lived on, cropping up in both the US and distant parts of the world. In March 2019, New Zealand, a far-right shooter opened fire at a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and leaving behind a manifesto that complained of the immigrant invasion. Five months later, a white nationalist fatally shot 23 shoppers in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, to prevent what he called the “Hispanic invasion.” That year, in the first nine months alone, a Guardian analysis found at the time, Trump’s reelection campaign had already run more than 2,000 Facebook ads that characterized immigration as an invasion.

Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today and several other books about the far right, explained that there is “a direct line” between invasion rhetoric and right-wing violence. “There is a long history of portraying immigrants as a militant threat by framing immigration as invasion, to suggest that undocumented people are not just unlike us, but are foreign agents, a fifth column, or a sleeper cell waiting to destroy our way of life,” he said. “What this does is send a dog whistle for the more explicit white nationalists in [Trump’s] coalition to understand the claim in conspiratorial terms, and it also helps move his supporters past their own empathy and accept cruel and violent treatment of migrants as appropriate.”

By latching onto the invasion trope, Trump and his allies were tapping into a grim American tradition whose history predates and inspires modern iterations of both the white genocide myth and the great replacement theory. For some two centuries, invasion rhetoric has fueled nativist vigilantism and anti-immigrant state violence.  

One of the early proponents of the invasion conspiracy theory was Samuel FB Morse, a prominent painter and inventor who contributed to the creation of the single-wire telegraph and Morse Code. A strict New England Puritan, Morse wrote a series of articles in 1834 that amounted to a blistering attack on Catholic immigration from Europe. Those articles were later collected and reprinted as the 1835 book The Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Writing under the pen name Brutus, Morse sounded the alarm on an “insidious invasion” through which the Catholic Church sought to infiltrate and destroy the United States. Without action to stop new arrivals, the country would soon fall “completely under the control of a foreign power.” 

According to Morse’s argument, Catholics could never move past their supposed allegiance to the Vatican, and were unable to either understand or embrace the spirit of the American republic. As a solution, he proposed a melding of the Protestant church and the state and an overhaul of the country’s naturalization laws, which had produced “alarming evil.” The Catholic immigrants arriving in the country, in his words, were ignorant, indoctrinated, and neither loyal nor capable of loyalty to the United States. “At this moment the ocean swarms with ships crowded with this wretched population,” he wrote, “bearing them from misery abroad to misery here.”

Morse’s militant stance against Catholic immigration made him an easy fit for the Native American Party, for which his writing provided an intellectual basis. In 1836, Morse ran as a nativist candidate in the New York City mayoral elections and lost. The Native American Party was often referred to as the Know Nothings — if asked by an outsider about the group, a member was meant to reply only that they “knew nothing.” Between 1850 and 1855, the Know Nothings became the fastest-growing party in the United States, and by late 1854, the party had grown to more than a million members around the country. The Know Nothings’ rise led to both institutionalized discrimination and violence. In San Francisco, a party member who became a judge barred Chinese immigrants from testifying against white citizens in court. In Chicago, a Know Nothing mayor banned immigrants from city employment. In Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Louisville, and elsewhere, nativist propaganda against immigrant communities led to brutal attacks and deadly riots. Immigration, the party warned, was an assault on the country, and so-called native-born Americans had a duty to fight back. “Rise, brothers, spurn invasion,” went one of the party’s songs, “let’s die or save the nation.”

“At this moment the ocean swarms with ships crowded with this wretched population, bearing them from misery abroad to misery here.” – Samuel FB Morse

Summing up the Know Nothings’ success and tactics, the scholar A. Charlee Carlson has argued that the party erected a vast conspiracy “along traditional lines” to turn Americans against the notion that the country welcomed the world’s destitute. “An evil force was threatening to subvert the values of the United States, its agents had been detected, and brave heroes were needed to crush the threat,” Carlson wrote. “The nativist version cast Catholics and immigrants as the villains and American voters as the heroes. The Know-Nothings were masterful at turning this basic plotline into a compelling drama.”

The invasion theme saturated much of the country’s anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the remainder of the 19^th century. In the 1870s, for instance, California newspapers made a habit of running panicked headlines about a so-called “Chinese invasion.” Sinophobic media coverage continued at a steady clip for years, eventually feeding the nativist rage that led to deadly anti-Chinese pogroms like the three-day riots that killed four people in San Francisco in 1877. 

Reece Jones, a geographer and author of several books about borders, documented the intense campaign of discrimination Chinese immigration during the second half of the 19th century in his 2021 book White Borders. After years of hysteria that framed Chinese immigration constituted an “invasion” and an effort to turn the West into a “Chinese colony,” Jones wrote, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the country for 10 years, becoming the first piece of legislation that openly cited race and nationality to restrict immigration. 

Even as the 19th century came to an end, the invasion trope — and the state repression and anti-immigrant violence it fueled — proved remarkably resilient. 

In the early 20^th century, several popular books likened immigration to an invasion. Journalist and statistician Frank Julian Warne’s The Immigrant Invasion, published in 1913, blamed foreign-born newcomers for much of the country’s problems, reserving special ire for Slavs and Italians. In contrast to the supposed “invasions of other centuries and of other countries,” Warne argued, “the present-day immigration to the United States is not by organized armies coming to conquer by the sword.” He went on to later decry that “the foreign-born element has already entered into the racial strain of the native population.”

Three years later, the conservationist Madison Grant released The Passing of the Great Race: Or, a Racial Basis for European History, an exhaustive, pseudoscientific tome that, in part, frames the history of human movement as a series of invasions. In writing the book, Grant hoped to make the case against non-Nordic immigration to the United States. Grant’s Passing of the Great Race became a foundational text for white supremacists and eugenicists, years later even prompting German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to write the author a fawning letter describing the book as his “Bible.”

Throughout the rest of the 20^th century, anti-immigrant activists and politicians used invasion rhetoric to rally support against newcomers and foreign-born citizens alike. In the 1920s, fears of a “Mexican invasion” weren’t uncommon, and the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan directed much of its propaganda and violence against the foreign-born. As the Great Depression struck, invasion rhetoric continued, pitting white workers against foreign-born laborers. While economic collapse drove many Mexicans to leave the country in the 1930s, states and local authorities embarked on so-called repatriation programs that likely pushed hundreds of thousands to depart the United States. Invasion rhetoric persisted, regaining popularity in ebbs and flows, through the Great Depression, the mass internment of Japanese during World War II, and the Cold War. In 1954, for instance, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service claimed the US was under “invasion,” then launched an initiative under the racist name Operation Wetback, at one point deporting more than 4,000 people in a single day. 

“The invasion rhetoric is powerful because it takes something that might seem innocent, people migrating for work or better opportunities for their families, and transforms it into an existential threat to the security of the country,” Jones, the border expert, author, and geographer, told me.

In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail’s racist dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints helped popularize the belief that immigration from the Global South would ultimately overwhelm and topple western countries. (Jones explained that the novel went on to become “a bible” for the anti-immigrant right across the decades since its release.) In 1976, the year after The Camp of the Saints first appeared in English, Leonard F. Chapman, then commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, took to the pages of Reader’s Digest to argue that the country was facing “a growing, silent invasion of illegal aliens” that would soon turn into “a national disaster.”  

Like today, hardline anti-immigrant groups who believed immigration amounted to an invasion often responded by trying to take matters into their own hands, at times turning to vigilante violence. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, influential Klan leader Louis Beam, and other Klansmen, for instance, conducted anti-immigrant patrols on the US-Mexico border in 1977. The Hooded Order, Duke told the press at the time, only wanted to stop “this rising tide washing over our border” because it would “affect our culture.” Both Democratic and Republican politicians, as well as law enforcement, criticized the Klan’s anti-immigrant patrols, even as a growing number of comparably mainstream conservative groups began to advocate for harsh restrictions on immigration. 

In 1979, John Tanton, the former head of Zero Population Growth, cofounded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a nonprofit that spent the 1980s lobbying GOP lawmakers while simultaneously laundering white nationalism for a broader audience. Tanton himself would later coauthor, alongside white supremacist Wayne Lutton, a 1994 book titled The Immigration Invasion. Decades later, the Southern Poverty Law Center would describe Lutton and Tanton’s book as “a nativist screed,” noting that it was “so raw in its immigrant bashing that Canadian border authorities have banned it as hate literature.” 

During Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, he called for draconian restrictions on immigration. In fact, he visited the US-Mexico border in May 1992 and, standing in front of a group of people hoping to cross, complained to reporters of the “national disgrace” that immigration was becoming. “The failure of the national government of the United States to protect the borders of the United States from an illegal invasion that involves at least a million aliens a year,” he claimed. “As a consequence of that, we have social problems and economic problems. And drug problems.”

Buchanan repeated the invasion line over the following decades, and in 2002, his book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization argued for a major overhaul of immigration law. He proposed maximum quotas, suspensions of certain visa programs, no amnesty measures, and mass deportations, to name a few proposals, to “stem today’s invasion of the United States.” Buchanan reserved special vitriol for Mexican immigrants in the US, who, the way he put it, were creating “a nation inside a nation” and refused to assimilate.

In the early 2000s and 2010s, the invasion trope continued to inspire far-right violence, with anti-immigrant militias flocking to border communities to try to stop people from crossing into the US. Some even answered the call to violence by targeting immigrants deep inside the country. In 2016, for instance, a trio of far-right militiamen were arrested at the tail-end of the elections that first saw Trump put in power. They stood accused of plotting to bomb a mosque and apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, and kill Somali refugees. After the court convicted them, the defense lawyers filed a startling sentencing memo in which they blamed Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric for inciting the plan to carry out a massacre. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” they wrote. 

In the years since Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, the invasion conspiracy theory reached even more alarming heights, becoming commonplace parlance for national leaders and prominent politicians around the world. Greece’s nominally center-right prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has bragged about his government’s thwarting of the “illegal immigrant invasion on our border,” while high-ranking members of Germany’s ultra-right Alternative for Deutschland have similarly called on voters to help it fight the “invasion of foreigners.” In Italy, the Netherlands, and France, conservative and far-right figures have followed suit, pushing for strict border controls and tighter immigration laws to reduce the number of displaced people reaching their countries.

But few European leaders have done as much as far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, arguably Trump’s closest European ally, to advance the invasion narrative. For years, Orban has accused Brussels of turning a blind eye to the “invasion” of the continent. “Africa wants to kick down our door, and Brussels is not defending us,” Orban said in 2018. “Europe is under invasion already, and they are watching with their hands in the air.”

Back in the United States, Trump, his political allies, and his right-wing media fans relied on the same anti-immigrant playbook throughout the Biden presidency. In Texas, for instance, Republican Governor Greg Abbott — who condemned anti-immigrant rhetoric after the 2019 El Paso mass shooting — soon began to use the term himself. In March 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a controversial state-led immigration crackdown, and soon declared a disaster on the southern border with Mexico. Texas Republicans to the right of Abbott weren’t satisfied, though, and demanded that the governor declare an invasion. In 2022, Abbott began invoking the state “invasion clause” to justify the state-led border enforcement, though critics argued that it didn’t apply to immigration. 

Meanwhile, the word began to become a routine feature of campaign ads in states including Georgia, Florida, and Arizona. In February 2022, then Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote a legal opinion claiming that the governor could declare an invasion of the state and thus activate the Constitution’s “war powers” in order to dispatch National Guard troops to detain migrants. Late the following year, Kari Lake, a far-right Trump ally who had already run an unsuccessful campaign for governor in Arizona, accused Democrats of ignoring “an invasion at the Arizona border” when she launched her ultimately failed bid for the US Senate. 

Throughout that period, the campaign to get the border crisis dubbed an invasion was partly designed to force the government to respond by attempting to “trigger the deployment of military and police” to the borderlands, according to Melissa del Bosque of the Border Chronicle. Del Bosque, who has covered the US-Mexico border for decades, told me that “the ‘invasion’ and ‘Biden Border Crisis’” rhetoric that became common in those years was part of “a campaign” that was “pushed by former Trump cabinet members.” Among those who spearheaded the invasion campaign was Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump administration and is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Ken Cuccinelli, who was Trump’s deputy secretary of homeland security from 2019 until 2021. 

The right-wing media ecosystem played its part, too. In 2021, Fox Nation dispatched Tucker Carlson to a handful of border communities to investigate this alleged invasion. The series the network later ran, The Illegal Invasion, was advertised as a deep expose of how Americans were left “powerless,” a strange choice of words to describe a film that repeatedly shows clips of Border Patrol and other law enforcement handcuffing and arresting people who had crossed the border.

Meanwhile, the same rhetoric continued to be echoed in the manifestos and words of far-right mass shooters. In May 2022, an 18-year-old mass shooter named Payton S. Gendron live-streamed himself gunning down shoppers at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. By the time he stopped, he had killed 10 people and injured at least three others. Like many others before him, he left behind a manifesto that complained of an immigrant “invasion.”

When Trump launched his third bid for the Oval Office in 2024, his campaign once again placed the invasion claim at the center of its anti-immigrant messaging. The Republican Party and the Trump campaign ran political ad upon political ad repeating the claim. Immigration proved one of the key electoral issues, along with the cost of living and crime, that helped catapult Trump back into office. Since his return to the White House, Trump has issued at least three executive orders that frame immigration and immigrants as part of a coordinated invasion of the United States.

The same day he returned to the Oval Office, Trump signed an executive order that declared an invasion on the southern border. That order claims that foreign newcomers “present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans,” while others “are engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities.” That same day, Trump signed a second executive order that billed emergency measures — the suspension of entry at the border and barring the entry of those supposedly threatening public health — as necessary to protect states against invasion. Just shy of two months later, the Trump administration announced another executive order that invoked the Alien Enemies Act against Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan gang it insisted had “unlawfully infiltrated the United States” and was “conducting irregular warfare” against the country.

The Brennan Center for Justice’s Elizabeth Goitein and Katherine Yon Ebright, reflecting on the significance of Trump’s executive orders, warned in February that the president was not merely attempting to “misappropriate wartime laws” in order to expand immigration enforcement during a time of peace. Rather, they argued that these measures are part of an effort “to lay claim to vast presidential powers that don’t exist in peacetime or wartime” and amount to “a direct assault on the constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law.”

The president made that prediction reality in September, when he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the country’s top military generals to leave their posts around the world and assemble at Quantico. Hegseth spent 45 minutes lambasting the military leaders over the presence of “fat troops” and “fat generals” in the armed forces and railed against the institution’s supposedly “woke” policies. Trump then took the podium and turned the invasion rhetoric inward. Since June, his administration has deployed National Guard and troops to Democrat-run cities, according to the president, to either help put down protests or fight crime. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids using the military for domestic law enforcement, but Trump told the generals the military would now deploy its troops to “dangerous” American cities to fight “a war from within.” These deployments, he said, would provide “training grounds for our military,” which would also wage war on “the invasion from within.”

Though the shift might appear shocking, it was predictable. The country’s history of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories is a long, infrequently interrupted line of vigilante and state violence, but it has almost uniformly worked hand-in-hand with domestic repression. More than a century ago, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman warned that the politicians and propagandists who peddle anti-immigrant hysteria and demand patriotism would without fail refocus their sights on American citizens, whether naturalized or US-born, who raise a dissenting hand. Goldman and Berkman, who had only just been deported, described this demagoguery as “White Terror” and argued that it would not only target politically radical immigrants. “Its hand is already reaching out far for the naturalized American whose social views are frowned upon by the Government,” they wrote. “And yet deeper it strikes. One hundred percent Americanism is to root out the last vestige, the very memory, of traditional American freedom.”