President Donald Trump’s extreme unpopularity has the Republican Party seemingly on course for a midterm elections drubbing — which means it’s once again time for Fox News to try to scare its viewers to the polls with frantic coverage of a “caravan” of migrants in Central America headed toward the U.S.-Mexico border.
In October 2018, Fox hosts began warning viewers that a group of up to 4,000 Honduran migrants were moving through Central America with plans to “storm our border” — and urged Trump to make that “caravan” a central issue for that year’s midterm elections. Trump, an inveterate Fox watcher whose worldview is shaped by the network, obliged. Fox showered its viewers with hours of coverage over the ensuing days, and the story also became a major fixation of mainstream news outlets in the leadup to the election.
Eight years later, Fox is starting to run the same play. Trump’s approval numbers have tanked due to his economic policymaking and Iran war, and GOP officials are reportedly panicking over the upcoming midterms and treating the president as a liability for their prospects. Fox and the Trump administration are using the narrative of a new “caravan” to drive attention back to border security, a rare issue where Trump and his party retain an advantage in the polls, but one whose salience has fallen.
Anthony Aguero, a former GOP congressional candidate turned conservative border news streamer, drew attention to the “caravan” on Sunday with a viral social media post. “Over 400 aliens predominantly from Honduras entered Mexico on Thursday, ready to make their way to the US southern border,” he wrote. “Here’s footage of the caravan. Someone is incentivizing this movement, this is not organic.”
While the group is reportedly growing, it remains a fraction of the size of the 2018 “caravan” — which was successfully dispersed by U.S. authorities rather than “storming” the border — raising questions about why the 2026 version deserves significant coverage at all.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump critic, has a hypothesis. “We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now?” she responded to Aguero’s post. “Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”
To be sure, Greene is a notorious conspiracy theorist who sees insidious forces everywhere.
But sure enough, on Monday, Fox News Digital ran a story featuring what it termed an “ominous warning” to the “caravan” provided to Fox by the Department of Homeland Security. “Biden’s disastrous open border policy has been SEALED SHUT,” DHS stated. “Anyone attempting to illegally enter the United States will be apprehended, prosecuted, and removed from the country.”
That night, Fox host Laura Ingraham gave the story a partisan spin during her opening monologue. Ingraham denounced “blue cities” for “doling out the cash” to “illegals,” then raised the specter of the “new caravan.”
“So with all this cash waiting and what they perceive to be a weakened GOP, hundreds of migrants have now organized themselves into a new caravan and are heading through Mexico toward the U.S. border,” she said. “Now, someone got to them and probably got them to pay heavy prices in hopes that if they reach the border and Republicans get shellacked in the mid-terms, they'll just be let in.”
Ingraham’s program aired footage of a column of migrants walking along a highway over the chyron, “Amnesty for all is the Dem plan.”
The Fox host later brought on White House “border czar” Tom Homan, who was conveniently available, to fearmonger about the migrants and assure viewers that Trump would keep his promises about border security.
Fox & Friends, the president’s beloved morning show whose fixation on the 2018 “caravan” played a key role in attracting his attention, joined in on Tuesday.
“Right now, a caravan of more than 600 migrants is heading toward the U.S.,” co-host Brian Kilmeade warned as Fox aired footage of the group, noting that it is “traveling through Mexico — you’re looking at them now — after departing Honduras earlier this month.”
Kilmeade read from the DHS statement, then added, “Critics say the mass migration could be on hopes Democrats will embrace open border policies if they control Congress.”
His guest, retired chief border patrol agent Chris Clem, then speculated that the migrants were involved in illicit election interference.
“It is a different election cycle, but the same bad cast with the same bad script,” Clem claimed. “But here’s the good news, we’ve got a president and a border security policy that shuts this down. So, I think this is just about propaganda to bring some kind of sympathetic plight to the migrants.”
“This is really about showing some kind of opportunity at the midterm,” he added. “We saw this play out in 2018, we saw this play out again in 2020, they are coming here to try to make a point against the strong enforcement policies by this administration.”
The same “bad cast” does seem to be running the same “bad script,” and there’s definitely “propaganda” involved.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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