On Tuesday, the Biden administration issued a new sweeping executive order further limiting access to asylum at the US-Mexico border. The long-anticipated move, which relies on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration to restrict immigration, will allow border officials to temporarily suspend asylum processing between official ports of entry and swiftly return migrants to neighboring Mexico and countries of origin at times when crossings rise to a certain threshold. The directive, which mirrors a now-defunct Senate border deal, is set to go into effect on Tuesday at midnight.

“President Biden believes we must secure our border,” a White House statement reads. “That is why today, he announced executive actions to bar migrants who cross our Southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum. These actions will be in effect when high levels of encounters at the Southern Border exceed our ability to deliver timely consequences, as is the case today.”

This latest and likely most drastic crackdown on asylum by a Democratic president in recent years comes at a time when migrant encounters at the southern border are in decline after record-breaking levels of migration. The move consolidates President Biden’s marked rightward shift on immigration and signals how far the administration is willing to go to rebut Republicans and Donald Trump’s “open borders” accusations. Critics and advocates say that, in trying to come on top of a sticky electoral issue ahead of the November vote, Biden might just end up outdoing his opponent’s hardline record by gutting access to asylum.

“It’s notable to see the White House prep a POTUS event on policies that Dems used to call illegal,” Andrea R. Flores, who once served as director for border management on Biden’s National Security Council, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, prior to the announcement. “Pundits will say this is a smart move to the center on immigration, but this issue has moved so far to the right that Dems are embracing extreme asylum bans even when border numbers are down.”

The executive order is based on section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act which allows the president to suspend the entry of foreigners if “detrimental to the interests” of the United States. The directive places a cap on the processing of asylum claims and migrants that would be triggered once unlawful border crossings reach an average of 2,500 per day over a week. The partial ban would only be lifted 14 days after the weekly average of daily encounters fall to 1,500.

Last month, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded a daily average of 3,700 encounters between ports of entry—a significant decrease from the 8,000 registered in December, but still high enough to set off the border closure. The executive order, which includes exemptions for unaccompanied minors and migrants fleeing imminent harm, is likely to prompt legal challenges—and potential court orders blocking the effort—similar to the ones the Trump administration faced.

BREAKING: The Biden administration just announced an executive order that will severely restrict people's legal right to seek asylum, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk.

This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration's asylum ban. We will be challenging…

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 4, 2024

In a 10-minute announcement, Biden blamed Republicans for not taking congressional action to secure the border. “Frankly, I’d have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation,” he said, adding that “Republicans left me no choice.”

The president also tried to distance himself from the Trump administration. “I will never demonize immigrants,” he said. “I’ll never refer to immigrants as poisoning the blood of a country. And further, I’ll never separate children from their families at the border. I will not ban people from this country because of their religious beliefs. I will not use the US military to go into neighborhoods all across the country, to pull millions of people out of their homes and away from their families, to put detention camps while we’re waiting deportation, as my predecessor says he will do if he occupies this office again.”

The timing of the policy move follows the results of the presidential elections in Mexico that saw Claudia Sheinbaum, a protege of outgoing leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, elected the country’s first woman president. The recent drop in migrant crossings into the United States is due in no small part to the Mexican government’s increased clampdown on migration. The return of migrants and asylum seekers per the executive order would inevitably require Mexico’s cooperation.

Almost since the moment Biden took office having vowed to restore “moral leadership” on immigration, he has been hit with a barrage of attacks from Republicans determined to weaponize the immigration debate to score political points. Despite calls from advocates and immigration experts to espouse an openly pro-immigrant agenda and underscore a fundamental contrast between Biden and Trump, the administration and Democrats have instead gradually ceded ground to the right.

“This is a dark day for the Biden administration,” Azadeh Erfani, senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said. “After campaigning on restoring asylum access, Biden is now fully embracing Trump’s policies as his own, including now using the same statute that led to the Muslim and African bans.” This crackdown on asylum, she added, is unlikely to have the intended effect of managing the border. “If we learned anything from the Trump years,” Erfani said, “it is that even the cruelest policies cannot succeed in “deterring” people fleeing for their lives.”

In January, Biden had already promised to “shut down” the border when calling on Congress to pass a restrictive bipartisan Senate border deal that primarily delivered on Republicans’ border enforcement priorities. The proposed bill, which Trump successfully torpedoed to keep the border a salient issue he can hammer on to appeal to his base, has twice failed to gain enough support. Most recently, Senate Republicans—including Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, one of the champions of the original bipartisan push—blocked a renewed attempt by Democrats at passing a deal, decrying it as political theater.

With lawmakers from both parties playing the blame game, Biden has latched on Republicans’ obstruction as a campaign target. “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a May statement after the border deal. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.” In the process, he is doubling down on the enforcement-first rhetoric to claim, “I’ve done all I can do.”

In early April, Sarah Moore got the news she was dreading: Her husband, Dennis Jackson Moore, had been denied parole again. It was his fourth rejection in as many years. 

Dennis, who goes by Vega, is 45. He has spent more than half his life in prison in Virginia for a murder and armed robbery he committed as a teenager. At the time, his defense argued that he did not fully understand the charges against him and had been misled by a detective when he gave a recorded confession. Vega was tried in adult court. Prosecutors called him a “cunning seventeen and three-quarters-year-old who committed a violent and senseless act.” When Vega was 18, the jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to 53 years in prison. 

Up until four years ago, Vega, like most people in Virginia prisons, was not eligible for parole. But in 2020 state lawmakers extended the possibility of early release to Vega and hundreds of others who carried out crimes as juveniles and have served at least 20 years of their sentence. “We are a nation of second chances,” Senator David W. Marsden, a Democrat who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said at the time, “and those who are incarcerated for long periods of time when they are juveniles are especially deserving of that look.”

Vega’s 38-page application packet to the parole board makes the case that he is no longer a “misguided seventeen-year-old who made extremely reckless and thoughtless decisions.” He says he has spent more than two decades behind bars working to better himself—getting his GED, teaching himself multiple languages, studying real estate, marrying Sarah, and learning to care for her two daughters and son from afar. Vega says he’s become a rehabilitated and remorseful man worthy of an opportunity to rejoin society. If he ever gets out, he wants to help at-risk youth avoid incarceration. “I’ve grown up in prison,” he writes, “but I will not make prison my life.”  

After repeated denials from the parole board, Sarah says any second chance for her husband only seems good on paper. Like in previous decisions, the parole board’s most recent denial delivered in late March stated that releasing Vega would diminish the seriousness of his crime and he should serve more time. “We’re just so frustrated,” Sarah said after his latest rejection. She’s left wondering: “What more does he have to do?” 

For Vega and others eligible for parole in Virginia, the odds of being released have gone from slim to nearly impossible in recent years under new GOP leadership, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis of monthly parole board decisions. 

Under past Democratic administrations, Virginia already had one of the harshest parole systems in the nation, with single-digit annual approval rates. But parole grants have declined even further since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin began to overhaul the parole board in 2022, dipping to an approval rate of just 1.6 percent in 2023. So far this year, Youngkin’s parole board has approved only eight of the 628 applications it considered, a grant rate of 1.3 percent, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis. 

In March, the month Vega was denied for a fourth time, the board approved only 2 out of the 117 cases it considered. 

As chances for parole decline across the country, experts say the Commonwealth stands out. “Virginia is paroling basically nobody,” says Wanda Bertram with the Prison Policy Initiative. The blanket denial of conditional release to deserving candidates, supporters of parole argue, ultimately advances blind punishment and undermines incentives toward rehabilitation and positive change.

Vega says he now understands the devastation caused by his actions. “I took a life and I don’t condone that,” he says. “I don’t even understand my thoughts at that time, but I feel for the victim’s family.” (In a 1997 victim impact statement, the mother of Vance Horne, the man he killed, wrote that the loss of her son felt “as though a part of my body, a part of my very being has been taken away without warning or reason.”) In the years since, Vega says he’s become a different person. “I’m not the same guy anymore,” he explains. “Who of us is the same person they were at that age?” 

He also sees how the crime hurt his own family; Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says his arrest for the murder felt like “someone reached in my chest and pulled my heart out and just set it on fire.”

With every “no” from the parole board, Vega and his supporters feel like the system is dangling a possibility for release that will never materialize: “What’s the point of having a second chance available,” he wonders, “when you’re not willing to give it?” 

Almost two decades ago, during the height of a nationwide wave of tough-on-crime policies, Virginia effectively abolished parole by adopting a “truth-in-sentencing” law. The new rules mandated people serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Only elderly prisoners, or those convicted before the law was enacted in 1995, were eligible for parole. 

Before parole was gutted, 46 percent of eligible candidates in Virginia were granted early release. By 1998, that figure had dropped to 5 percent. Although the number of people up for parole has grown in recent years as a result of criminal justice reforms expanding eligibility and an aging adult population, their chances of actually getting out have remained low. Only about 6 percent of parole applicants were approved under Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor from 2014 to 2018.

Recognizing a problem, McAuliffe created a state commission to study reinstating parole, questioning whether Virginia kept too many people in prison for too long. In 2019, Democrats seized control of the rest of the state government. Soon after, Virginia extended parole eligibility to juvenile offenders like Vega, as well as to people convicted by juries between 1995 and 2000 because of constitutional issues with how trials were conducted at the time. 

But even with those expansions, parole releases were still a drop in the bucket compared to a state prison population of roughly 24,000. This contributed to Virginia’s crowded prisons and aging incarcerated population—at a high cost to taxpayers. 

“The expectation pre-1995 was that you had a very good chance of receiving parole once you were eligible to be reviewed,” says Allison Weiss, a professor of prison litigation at Washington and Lee University School of Law who teaches a course where students assist parole applicants. “Over time, there’s just been a narrowing of the view of what parole is or should be in the state.” 

By the time McAuliffe ran for governor again in 2021, Youngkin had folded attacks on Virginia’s already-restrictive parole system into a broader GOP campaign that painted Democrats as soft on crime. “Terry McAuliffe’s hand-picked parole board had one mission—cut them loose,” Youngkin posted on X during the race, adding that Virginia wouldn’t be safe under his opponent. 

After taking office the following year, Youngkin swiftly fired his predecessor Ralph Northam’s five-member parole board and installed his own appointees, some of whom had openly opposed releasing people on parole—triggering a political standoff with Democrats who still control the state Senate and must confirm the governor’s nominees. The Senate blocked most of Youngkin’s initial selections, except for Chadwick Dotson, a former judge and prosecutor who was chosen to chair the parole board. 

Even before this battle to reshape it, the agency was already in disarray. In 2010, prisoners who were eligible for parole but denied multiple times sued the parole board, claiming it refused to properly consider their cases; the reason for denial provided in most instances was the seriousness of the original crime. A 2021 report from Washington and Lee University found deficiencies in the board’s decision-making process, including the fact that members don’t meet in person to discuss cases and instead vote electronically. 

Virginia Republicans have also criticized the parole board for failing to give legally required notices to victims and prosecutors when considering releases and for proceeding with some releases without receiving recommendations from local parole officers. As chair, Dotson issued a report to the governor last year calling for “drastic changes” to the board, like opening the hearings to the public and expanding the number of board members. 

Under Youngkin, the board has consistently been missing a fifth member, working at times with as few as three members, which experts say further diminishes chances for parole applicants.

Several advocates for people seeking parole say Dotson seemed to make improvements to the board’s practices. During his tenure, Dotson made visits to parole candidates, sometimes accompanied by other board members. Members also began gathering on a weekly basis to debate cases where there was “reasonable chance” of granting release. 

“I think he did give people a fair chance,” says Lisa Spees, who has advocated on behalf of more than 30 parole candidates in Virginia over the years. “He implemented a lot of changes into the parole system that were much needed.” Having the opportunity to meet with a parole board member, Spees added, “gave the individual a sense of being a part of that decision-making process.” She and others fear that Dotson’s departure last year brought that momentum to a halt. 

Even with those improvements, when Dotson chaired the board, between January 2022 and September 2023, the grant rate was only about 2 percent. 

Last September, Youngkin replaced Dotson as board chair by appointing Patricia West. A one-time judge and former chief deputy attorney general, West also once acted as state director of juvenile justice; decades ago she served on Republican Governor George Allen’s commission that pushed for minors as young as 14 to be automatically tried in adult court when charged with some violent offenses. 

Shawn Weneta, who was until recently a policy strategist with the ACLU of Virginia, calls West “the architect of parole abolition in Virginia.” He points to her role during the Allen administration, which led the charge to eliminate parole. In 1996, Allen picked West as secretary of public safety overseeing Virginia’s prisons and parole. “We have serious concerns with her being in that role [of parole board chair],” Weneta says. 

At first, Senate Democrats tried to remove West from a list of gubernatorial appointments pending confirmation. But, with little explanation, they voted a few days later to confirm her. Between her appointment last September and late March, West has voted on fewer than 50 cases to consider parole, according to state records showing individual board members’ voting history. She approved just three people for release, all of whom were eligible under geriatric release—available for applicants 65 or older after serving at least five years of their sentence and those 60 or more who served a minimum of 10 years. 

Julie McConnell, a law professor at the University of Richmond and director of a defense clinic that works on juvenile parole law cases, says Virginia’s current parole board only seems to be approving such geriatric cases. In past years, McConnell says her legal clinic won parole for seven candidates who committed crimes as juveniles. 

So far in 2024, she says none of the applicants represented by her clinic have been granted parole. 

“I don’t know that there is a silver bullet with this board where you can present the perfect package to them that gets their attention,” McConnell says. She suspects the board focuses more on aspects outside of the applicant’s control like the crime itself or input from the prosecutor and victim’s families. 

“The Parole Board deals with some of the most heinous and violent offenders within the Department of Corrections who are eligible for parole,” Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez said in an email. “Judge West and the Parole Board assess each case with a comprehensive approach, guided by policies that prioritize the voices of victims before any decision is made to release violent offenders back on the street. Parole is not a right, it’s a privilege extended only to those inmates who are eligible for consideration.” West declined to answer questions for this story. 

Advocates for people seeking parole now worry that a recently announced policy change will even further decrease their chances of release. Starting in July, victims of people applying for parole will still be entitled to annual appointments with the board, while meetings with families and advocates for the parole applicants will instead now happen every two years.

“We’ve just become so acculturated to extreme punishment that we don’t even recognize when we’re going too far,” McConnell says. “We could give people an opportunity for a fresh start.” 

In late February, Leroy Gilliam III became one of the lucky few to be granted parole in Virginia. 

Gilliam, 51, had already served almost 28 years for first-degree murder by the time he went before the parole board last June. The board had denied him twice in recent years due to the serious nature of his crime. But this time, the board decided Gilliam had shown “excellent institutional adjustment” and didn’t present a threat to public safety. 

Gilliam was both thrilled and perplexed by the decision: “I don’t know what actually changed their minds this time.” 

Parole board decisions could soon at least become less opaque in Virginia. Last year, Youngkin signed a bipartisan transparency bill into law that the ACLU touted as “the biggest reform of Virginia’s parole system since 1994.” Under the new law, which takes effect in July, the board will have to publish more regular detailed reports with individualized reasons on grants and denials, and parole review hearings will be required to include interviews with candidates themselves. The bill also gives parole applicants and their attorneys access to all of the information being considered by the board. 

“We don’t know that it will increase grant rates at all,” Weneta says. “We certainly hope that it helps. But it’s a piece of the puzzle.” He believes insulating the parole board from the influence of any individual politician is the only way to ensure an equitable system. “As long as we continue to have partisan actors setting the mandate and making the appointments, they’re going to achieve the outcomes that they want,” he says, adding that the ultimate goal is to reinstate parole for everyone.  

When Vega’s stepdaughter, Shaelyce, first spoke to Virginia’s parole board two years ago, she told them how he had become the first male role model in her life. Before Vega came into the picture, Shaelyce says her mother had been in a 13-year-long abusive relationship and they were living out of a hotel. Shaelyce, 22, is now studying to become a child psychologist to work with children who have experienced trauma. 

Shaelyce remembers pouring her heart out to the board, but says it didn’t seem to make a difference. “It’s like there’s a tablecloth that we place on the table,” she recalls with tears in her eyes, “and every time we get ready for him to come home, they sweep it right from underneath us.” Her sister Carol, 24, has also come to see Moore as a father figure. “We got all these plans,” she says. “We talk about what it’s going to be like and then to get denied it’s heartbreaking.” 

Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says she goes through bouts of depression and shuts down after each denial from the parole board. “He picks me up and he tells me, ‘Mom, I didn’t have this chance when I first went to prison,’” she says. “‘At least now I have a chance.’” But in Virginia, that chance is increasingly unlikely.

Sarah says each denial feels personal, like the support she and her family have given him is insufficient. “You’re telling us, ‘you’re not good enough to get him home,’” she says.

The most infamous example is in Texas. In 2023, lawmakers passed SB 4, which makes it a state crime to cross the border into Texas between ports of entry. The law allows police officers to detain people suspected of entering the state illegally and empowers state judges to order deportations. (Initial punishment for a misdemeanor would carry jail time and repeat offenders could face felony charges and up to 20 years in prison.) Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), has called the measure “the most extreme anti-immigrant state law in the last 50 years, bar none.”

And this extreme law is spreading, with copycat anti-immigration bills cropping up in Republican-led states across the country. At least nine states have considered bills mirroring SB 4 so far this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In March, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds approved legislation, to go into effect in July, criminalizing “illegal re-entry.” Just last month, Louisiana lawmakers pushed through a bill allowing local law enforcement to enforce immigration law.

These anti-immigration laws raise the spectrum of an infamous measure adopted by Arizona in the not-so-distant past. In 2010, Arizona enacted SB 1070, a “show me your papers” law that, among other things, required state law enforcement to determine the immigration status of people under “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country without legal authorization. Following legal challenges, the United States Supreme Court struck down several provisions of the discriminatory law—with the exception of the mandate that authorities routinely ask for proof of legal status.

Crucially, the justices concluded in Arizona v. United States that “federal power to determine immigration policy is well settled.” But Texas, and other states, are hoping to challenge the current legal framework and, if it topples, have laws ready to go to police immigration.

Oklahoma’s legislation makes it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail or a maximum fine of $500 “if the person is an alien and willfully and without permission enters and remains in the State of Oklahoma without having first obtained legal authorization to enter the United States.” (It also requires them to leave the state within 72 hours of being convicted or released from custody.)

Stitt said upon signing the bill that the measure would not give “law enforcement the authority to profile individuals.” But opponents say the new legislation is one of the most extreme anti-immigrant laws in all of the United States—weaponizing state authorities against communities of color and potentially leading to racial profiling. “Local law enforcement lacks the expertise and the constitutional authority to interpret and enforce immigration law,” the ACLU of Oklahoma said in a press release critical of the legislation.

In both Texas and Oklahoma, Republican governors have called the laws necessary amid inaction from a Democratic administration at the federal level. But the bills represent a challenge to both well-established law and constitutional provisions.

SB 4 has been embroiled in a back-and-forth legal battle. The US Department of Justice, El Paso county, and two nonprofit groups have sued the state of Texas challenging SB 4 as unconstitutional because it violates the Supremacy Clause establishing that federal laws take precedent over state acts that conflict with the exercise of federal power. SB 4, the Biden administration argued, also ignores US Supreme Court’s precedents reaffirming federal authority to regulate immigration. “SB 4 impedes the federal government’s ability to enforce entry and removal provisions of federal law and interferes with its conduct of foreign relations,” according to the DOJ.

In February, a federal judge blocked SB 4 from going into effect, ruling that the law “threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice.” Texas appealed and the conservative Fifth Circuit granted an administrative stay suspending the lower court’s decision. The Supreme Court later allowed Texas to enforce the law pending ongoing litigation over its legality. But then a Fifth Circuit panel placed the implementation of SB 4 on temporary hold. “For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration—the entry, admission, and removal of noncitizens—is exclusively a federal power,” the court wrote.

If SB 4 prevails, immigrant rights advocates worry it could present the conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court with an opportunity to reverse its own previous ruling. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose power grab aspirations knows few boundaries, suggested as much to CNN, saying the state would “welcome a Supreme Court decision that would overturn the precedent set in the Arizona case.” He has argued that the enforcement of SB 4 is supported by Scalia’s dissent in the 2012 case, where the late justice wrote that Arizona was entitled to “its own immigration policy” as long as it didn’t conflict with federal law and found no reason why the state couldn’t make it a state crime to deport people. (Both Justice Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented in part with the majority, with Thomas’ opinion indicating he would have upheld all provisions of SB 1070.)

SB 4, Kate Melloy Goettel, senior legal director at the American Immigration Council, stated, “sets a disastrous precedent” for other states across the country to enact bills that could “result in significant civil rights abuses, leading to widespread arrests and deportations by state actors without key federal protections.” 

Standing next to Sessions that day was Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The intellectual “father” of the idea of separating families to deter migration, Homan was among the Homeland Security officials who first floated the extreme measure as a way to tackle the 2014 migrant family crisis during the Obama administration. (Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson rejected the proposal.) “Most parents don’t want to be separated,” Homan told the Atlantic‘s Caitlin Dickerson. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t think that would have an effect.”

Today, on the anniversary of the “zero tolerance” policy, Homan was again on public display—a speaker at a Heritage Foundation event called “Securing the Border and Keeping Americans Safe: How Illegal Immigration Leads to Preventable Crime.” It was meant to draw on a false trope linking immigrants to criminal activity and violence. (Evidence shows that immigrants are less likely than US citizens to commit crimes.)

Homan, a career law enforcement officer, now leads a homeland security consulting firm and is a fixture on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. In his office, he keeps a framed Washington Post article that said he was “really good” at deporting people. Homan is also helping lay the groundwork for a potential second Trump presidency’s mass deportation plans. “We’re going to do it the way we’ve always done it—professionally and well-planned—and we take the worst first,” he said on The Joe Piscopo Show earlier this week. Homan then added a caveat: “No one is off the table.” 

At Heritage, Homan condemned sanctuary cities as “sanctuaries for criminals” and referenced the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant who entered the United States unlawfully. The case quickly became a political flashpoint on the right and even prompted President Joe Biden to make “an illegal” remark during the State of the Union address, which he later regretted. “Do we want to talk about family separation?” Homan said, referencing Riley’s he added: “They buried their children. That’s the separation.” 

The 5,000 families forcibly separated under Trump and who are still living through the consequences of the zero tolerance policy might disagree with Homan’s assessment. In some cases, parents are still waiting for reunification after having been away from their children for years. As a result of a settlement agreement reached last year, some families are entitled to apply for temporary lawful status and work authorization in the United States. They may also have another shot at applying for asylum, but without access to legal counsel, the odds are stacked against them. As one advocate told me: “the actual physical reunification—it’s just one of a long process of healing and rebuilding.” 

Decrying the Biden administration’s border policies as the “biggest national security failure I’ve seen in this country in my lifetime,” Homan also parroted claims not supported by facts that most immigrants arrested by ICE under the previous administration had criminal records and that the Trump years saw the most secure border in history. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he said, “should have been impeached two and a half years ago.”

Garcia was subsequently found guilty of two felony charges related to his actions that day. But a year later, he seemed unrepentant: In fact, Garcia joined a press conference in Miami to commemorate the anniversary of the insurrection.

He wasn’t the only Latino there. As journalist Paola Ramos documents in her new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, the occasion drew members of the “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys, and many Latinos. “If we don’t agree with the left, or the media’s bias,” Garcia said at the press conference, “we get called ‘white supremacists’ or ‘racists.’ There’s nothing racist about a guy called Gabriel Garcia.” 

In Defectors, Ramos, a contributor for Telemundo News and MSNBC, investigates the “quiet radicalization of Latinos [that] is taking place across the nation in plain sight” and the factors behind the pull. Dispelling common stereotypes of Latinos in the United States as a unified bloc of voters allegiant to the Democratic Party and progressive values, Ramos writes that “to understand our history, which tells us that Latinos can carry white supremacist tendencies—whether they’re racially coded as white or not—is to understand that Latinos can easily act as the majority we are supposed to reject.”

I spoke with Ramos about how cultural assimilation can lead to nativism, the deep-seated anti-immigrant sentiment among some Latinos, and the shortcomings of dismissing a small but growing segment of that population as an anomaly.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clairty.

In the book, you write that “mythologies about Latino identity ignore the very real political and cultural changes brought about by the MAGA movement’s efforts.” Why is it an oversimplification to attribute Republicans’ and Trump’s inroads with Latinos in recent elections to just a “rightward shift” from 2016 to 2020?

I think the whole point of the book is that I try and force people to understand the story beneath the numbers, which is, to me, this idea that there are larger cultural, historical, and psychological forces that are driving a small—but I believe a growing number—of Latinos towards extremism and Trumpism. When you zoom into that, you see that there is this racial baggage, colonial mindset, and political traumas that we carry with us. I think what we’re seeing now is the way in which Trumpism is revealing those elements.

What are the main influences you identified as driving a small but significant number of Latinos to the right?

I structured the book in three ways: tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma. Tribalism I refer to as internalized racism. Our story is also part of the story of having been colonized. With that came a caste system, colorism. What I refer to as traditionalism is the way in which colonization enforces patriarchal and binary norms. What does that mean in today’s culture wars? What does that mean in today’s debates around Christianity and Christian nationalism? And then what I refer to as trauma is understanding the very complicated relationship that we have with communism, but the way also that we’ve had very complicated relationships with strongmen rule and authoritarianism and the history of the United States’ involvement in Latin America. All of those ‘T’s’’ manifest in very complicated ways in American politics. I think the easy story is to mark us off as this liberal, progressive, united bloc. But it’s actually a messy story, particularly when you understand the darker parts of our history.

How has the United States’ legacy of spreading American exceptionalism in Latin America impacted the country’s own ongoing “battle with democracy”?

The way that in this country defeating communism became synonymous with patriotism, with the ultimate definition of what it means to be an American…

From the way that we’ve been involved in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, where there were these very concerted efforts to overthrow, in some more violent and other more subtle ways, elements of socialism. Now what we see is not only a diaspora of Latinos that flee from those countries, but also a United States government that reinforces the idea of Democrats being synonymous with communism, which is part of the Trumpism strategy. There’s this tendency to go back to those wounds that are very familiar to Latinos. You’re fleeing communism? Well, communism can also happen in the United States. This idea that when democracy feels somewhat messy in the United States, then you resort to the strongman rule. 

I do think the majority of people that I’ve interviewed do actually have very traumatic experiences with the past. I don’t want to underestimate that. Where the manipulation happens is on the Republican Party side, where they’ve been able to really master is a way of exploiting that trauma through the spread of mis- and disinformation wars. They’ve also found a way to exploit that racial tension by creating this idea that there’s a crisis at the border, or fearmongering criminal talk.

The first chapter of your book focuses on anti-immigrant sentiment among some Latinos in the United States, including a first-generation Mexican immigrant turned border vigilante, Anthony Aguero, who sees recent migrants as people who are vastly different from him—even a threat. A recent Axios poll shows an increase in the percentage of Latinos who say they support building a border wall and ramping up deportations. What did you learn from your reporting about what leads some Latinos to embrace nativism?

There’s a blurry line. We can be minorities, but we too can perpetuate racism. Latinos, particularly the more generations are in this country, are not immune to nativism. The more we assimilate, the more we conform to American principles and the idea of “otherizing” is a real force, whether you’re Latino or whether you’re white. That’s why something like the great replacement theory is so forceful and is so potent. The dynamic of nativism at its core is this idea that culture is being threatened by the “other.” A lot of Latinos, no matter how American you are, have to work twice as hard to prove belonging. You’re third or fourth-generation Latino, but there are always these sentiments of not belonging or being “otherized” by fellow Americans and there’s this constant wrestling with the idea of having to prove yourself.

For a small group of Latinos, that journey can become very painful to the point that you can end up with some Latinos like Anthony Aguero who become fervent anti-immigrant vigilantes along the border because they’re pulled by those two notions of proving that they belong and proving that they are not like the “others.” It’s very easy to become radicalized just to prove that you are not them.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is so powerful, pervasive, and infectious that even newly arrived immigrants can sort of lean into that.

Do you think extreme anti-immigrant policies—like SB 4 in Texas, which in some ways is reminiscent of SB 1070, the “show me your papers” measure in Arizona, and Proposition 187, which denies undocumented immigrants access to public benefits in California—can lead to backlash and reverse this trend? 

This book is about a small but growing segment of Latinos. I do still think that the majority of Latinos are still more united.

I think what’s interesting about this moment is that I see it as a cultural reckoning. Is this the election where you have some Latinos continuing the numbers of 2020? And if that is the case, then perhaps parts of the white vote and the Latino vote are a lot more similar than not, and part of what’s driving that similarity is the issue of immigration.

But I still believe that the majority of Latinos are united by this solidarity as having immigrant roots. I think of the way that Arizona turned blue because of the trauma that so many of those immigrant children experienced as they were seeing their parents being deported by Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio. I still do believe that is at the core of what will drive the majority of Latinos this November—this idea that in the face of someone like Donald Trump, Latinos have more in common against that image than not.

We’re in an interesting moment where there’s still a little bit of distance between the border and some Latinos, between Donald Trump and some Latinos—but the moment that it starts to creep into their own reality where potentially someone can knock at your door and racially profile you no matter how long you’ve been in this country, then perhaps we’ll start to see a shift.

You argue that the Democratic Party has failed to see Latinos in their totality. What should Democrats do differently in 2024?

I do think that the Democratic Party, at least this time, is mobilizing earlier. They’re doing outreach a lot earlier than they have in previous years, they’re paying a lot of attention to Spanish-language media.

I always go back to: don’t dismiss the small shifts, the surveys, and the polls so quickly. Don’t dismiss these rightward shifts as anomalies or outliers. Because that means truly dismissing Latinos, once again, as really complex humans that carry a lot of complicated history, pasts, and traumas into this country. It goes back to this idea that Latinos are a monolith. Dismissing it can lead to results like we saw in 2020 when Trump did over 10 points better than he did in 2016. 

I hope that we can start to break that apart and have hard conversations about what it means to be an extremely complex, misunderstood community in this country.

Paraded as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL fights for Trumpist values in the legal system. And the group is prolific: In its three years of existence, AFL has taken on more than 100 legal actions—between lawsuits filed, complaints lodged with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and court briefs written, according to the Washington Post.

While it has notably played a major role in stopping debt relief for Black farmers, Miller’s organization has been perhaps most famous for its aggressive publicity strategy of “lawfare.”

AFL targets so-called “woke” corporate and government programs, alleging employment discrimination against white, heterosexual men. It has challenged Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in higher education and supposed “radical transgender ideology” in school districts. Typically, after filing a suit or complaint, Miller makes the rounds of the right-wing media circuit and fundraises off the attention. “Bogus suits,” securities law expert Benjamin Edwards explained in the Daily Beast, seem designed for a nonlegal goal: to issue “press releases” so AFL can “recruit more donors.” Miller’s group has reportedly spent more on ads than legal services. (AFL did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

The strategy has worked. In 2022, AFL brought in $44 million. Its revenue shot up by nearly 600 percent compared with the previous year. But less scrutinized has been how AFL has secured its haul. More than 60 percent of its funding came from a little-discussed entity: the Bradley Impact Fund. In 2022, Bradley doled out more than $27 million to AFL, according to the organization’s most recent available tax filing.

And AFL is far from the only culture-war donation the Bradley Impact Fund has dispensed.

That same year, according to tax filings, Bradley gave $7.8 million to Turning Point USA and $1.8 million to Project Veritas, the conservative outfit founded by provocateur James O’Keefe that mounts sting operations. The year prior, both organizations ranked at the top of the fund’s list of recipients, receiving $7.4 million and $2.1 million, respectively. (Before 2019, such contributions were limited to a few thousand dollars.) Another group to benefit from the fund has been America’s Future—led by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn—which received a $500,000 gift in 2022.

Over the last few years, the Bradley Impact Fund has experienced massive growth, emerging as one of the key bankrollers of the coterie of organizations and apparatchiks hoping to create institutions that carry out Trump’s ideological agenda. In the process, Bradley fuels the culture wars and undermines faith in democracy by stirring election denialism—all while keeping its donors secret.

Created in 2012, the Bradley Impact Fund is a donor-advised fund (DAF) “aligned” with the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has a long history of conservative influence and, of late, has become a source of money for organizations pushing Republicans to change election laws. Donor-advised funds, such as the Bradley Impact Fund, collect donations from various contributors and then make often untraceable gifts to other organizations. An increasingly popular charity tool—receiving a quarter of all individual giving in the United States—DAFs offer donors “multiple layers of anonymity,” explains Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the investigative watchdog Documented.

DAFs operate like private foundations but are classified as public charities. This allows the funds to give money without the same transparency requirements. And the donors, who can recommend where their contributions should go, are still awarded the publicly subsidized tax breaks associated with charitable giving.

Some of the largest US-based DAFs are funneling millions of dollars to groups pushing anti-LGBTQ agendas and working to restrict reproductive rights, as a recent OpenDemocracy investigation showed.

DAFs can essentially work as “slush funds for political engagement,” says Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It really is sort of a big wash for money.”

The Bradley Impact Fund has “quickly grown into a major player in the conservative space,” Fischer, an expert in campaign finance and government transparency issues, explains. Bradley is “shaping politics and policymaking in ways that will be felt for years to come,” Michael Beckel, research director with the political reform group Issue One, told the Guardian.

This work is being enabled by an extraordinarily small universe of donors. Bradley boasts about cultivating a network of contributors across 44 states. But more than 75 percent of contributions to the Bradley Impact Fund in 2022 came from just four sources, according to an audited financial statement filed with the California Department of Justice that the nonprofit research organization Accountable US shared with Mother Jones.

The Bradley Impact Fund received roughly $108 million in contributions and grants that year, including three donations of $36 million, $20 million, and $18 million, respectively. At least another $12 million came from a different donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. By its own admission, DonorsTrust is a convenient conduit for benefactors wishing to provide “gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” (In an email, Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, declined to comment on the reasons behind the grant to the Bradley Impact Fund, saying the implementation of the gift is left to the recipient. “Grants from one DAF provider to another are infrequent and certainly not nefarious,” he added.)

“It shows how purposefully opaque these money flows are,” Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable US, says. “They move through multiple different entities in a way that intentionally obscures sources.” The limited number of major funding sources to the Bradley Impact Fund, she adds, suggests that “they’re really only intended to work for a small elite group who doesn’t seem to be comfortable perhaps with the values that they are pushing across the country.”

In the fall of 2019, the Bradley Impact Fund held its ninth annual conference in Lake Geneva, a resort town in Wisconsin. Earlier that year, it had welcomed a new president, Gabriel Conger, previously an adviser to the president of the Heritage Foundation specializing in donor relations. Once a bastion of Reaganite orthodoxy, Heritage has, like much of the right, pivoted to something closer to MAGA populism. And the Bradley Impact Fund has seemed to follow suit. 

The theme of the conference was “Disruptors: Principles in Action.” One of the talks, focused on “Disrupting the Leftwing Agenda,” featured former Vice President Dick Cheney, Federalist top editor Mollie Hemingway, and right-wing commentator Candace Owens. Wilfred McClay, now a chair in classical history and Western civilization at Hillsdale College, was invited to “discuss the importance of breaking the Left’s stranglehold on American history.” (He promoted his book Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, an intended antidote to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—which McClay described as a “‘comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’”) 

“The war we have to fight is the war of ideas,” Owens told attendees. “We need to stand up and say what we believe every day—it’s the only way we will save America.”

The event also included a panel with the Teneo Network, a group that describes itself as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism.” It aims to expand on the yearslong crusade of Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo—who is a chair of Teneo’s board—to move US courts to the right.

After the conference, Conger warned in a newsletter that conservatives were “at a crossroads in this fight for our country’s future.” There was much work for the Bradley Impact Fund to do.

In short order, Conger assembled a massive war chest for this battle. After he took over as president, Bradley’s revenue, as well as grant-making, jumped by more than 650 percent. And the fund seemingly adjusted its giving priorities to meet the moment of the conservative movement. (The Bradley Impact Fund and Conger didn’t respond to an email with questions.)

In the last couple of years, Bradley has given not only to Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, and Miller’s AFL, but also to anti–Critical Race Theory groups. The fund has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to parental rights groups such as Parents Defending Education and Moms for America. In February, Moms for America joined a “Take Our Border Back” convoy that drew a mix of conspiracy theorists, January 6 insurrectionists, and Christian nationalists.

“The ramping up of giving to far-right and MAGA-aligned groups since 2020 is indicative of a broader evolution of the conservative movement,” Fischer says. Deep-pocketed donors, he adds, are channeling less money toward a first wave of traditionally conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Federalist Society, and more toward a newer breed of institutions “providing the support to push politics even further to the right.”

The Bradley Impact Fund shares some board of directors with the somewhat low-profile but impactful Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Founded in 1942, the private foundation with assets of more than $900 million has dispersed upward of $1 billion to back conservative causes advancing school choice and welfare reform and to defund unions. More recently, the foundation has funded “election integrity” efforts. The Bradley Foundation, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote in 2021, “has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence.” And it, too, has doubled down on building right-wing infrastructure. In the Bradley Foundation’s 2023 annual report, the organization disclosed donations of $250,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow, to “support efforts to combat identity politics,” $30,000 to Leo’s Teneo Network, and $100,000 to the sprawling MAGA “nerve center” known as the Conservative Partnership Institute.

The Bradley Impact Fund has provided even more funding to CPI. It funneled more than $1 million in donations to CPI between 2020 and 2022.

CPI, as the New York Times reported, has become a policy incubator for a potential second Trump term. Launched in 2017, it serves as a refuge for Trump loyalists and aides-in-waiting, too. It is led by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (who got booted as president of the Heritage Foundation in 2017 amid concerns that the organization had become overly political) and Trump’s ex–chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was recently indicted by a state grand jury in Arizona on felony charges related to efforts to subvert the 2020 election. 

The umbrella organization hosts a bevy of right-wing initiatives, including AFL and the Election Integrity Network, a project spearheaded by Cleta Mitchell—Trump’s former legal adviser who played a central role in the plot to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. (Mitchell also sits on the board of the Bradley Foundation.) The Election Integrity Network aims to recruit “an army of citizen volunteers” to monitor elections.

In 2021, Trump’s Save America PAC donated $1 million to CPI, which, like its spin-off organizations, is involved in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a roadmap for a future Trump administration to overhaul federal agencies and give unprecedented power to the president.

The nonprofit watchdog Campaign for Accountability recently filed a complaint with the IRS claiming CPI, a 501(c)(3), “indirectly engages in political campaign activity through a for-profit subsidiary that provides services to former President Donald Trump’s political campaign, as well as other Republican candidates, committees, and certain other partisan entities.” CPI did not respond to a request for comment. 

As a hub for pro-MAGA groups, CPI aspires to be a breeding ground for the next generation of conservative leaders. The organization conducts “ideological vetting” and training of candidates for congressional staff positions. One such bootcamp in April 2023 featured Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk as a speaker on “how to communicate conservative goals to a younger audience.” In another session, Stephen Miller spoke on “best practices for constructive social media posting.” (In its 2021 annual report, CPI calls his group AFL “the sling that hardworking, patriotic Americans can use to fight back against the abusive Goliath of the Biden Administration’s Deep State.”)

“We are the only organization that exists solely to unite and serve the conservative movement,” the group’s report states. 

CPI itself has turned into a fundraising powerhouse too, bringing in $36 million in 2022. Much of that money can be traced to a relatively little-known donor, Mike Rydin, the now-retired founder of a Texas-based construction software development company. Rydin has given more than $25 million to CPI since the January 6 invasion of the US capitol, according to the Daily Beast, and offered a “generous gift” to help the organization purchase property on Capitol Hill. In turn, CPI has named one of the townhouses in its expanding real estate “Patriots’ Row” campus for the far-right “The Rydin House,” which Newsmax has since used to film an apologist documentary about January 6 titled Day of Outrage. CPI’s 2,200-acre retreat on Maryland’s eastern shore also goes by “Camp Rydin.” Rydin, whose bio highlights his use of programming skills to design a dating website where he met his late wife, has a profile page on Kirk’s Turning Point USA website.

There isn’t any indication that Rydin, who previously said he wasn’t aware of CPI’s hiring of people involved in the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol, has donated to the Bradley Impact Fund. Rydin couldn’t be reached for comment. (While major donors to the Impact Fund have been disclosed in the past, they are currently not known.)

But Fischer sees a “corollary trend” in the development of the MAGA-aligned political infrastructure at large. “There appears to be an emerging new wave of far-right donors, many of them individuals with no political profile, who are ideologically motivated and seeking more than just deregulation or climate change denial,” he says.

And that’s where DAFs come in. By obscuring the identity of big donors behind an extraordinary amount of money passing through and to different groups fanning the flames of the culture wars, they make it hard to nail down where the flow starts and where it ends.

A rule to bring the bills to the House floor passed on Friday with critical support from Democrats. It came as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faced increased pressure—and threats of being ousted—from hardline Republicans opposed to sending more aid to Ukraine without a border deal. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who signed on to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to vacate against Johnson said the GOP Speaker was “colluding” with Democrats. “To send $100 billion overseas without reinforcing our own borders shows that we put America last,” he told reporters on Saturday.

Three foreign aid bills, which resembled proposed legislation that passed the Senate in February, secured $60.8 billion in emergency funding for Ukraine, $26.4 billion to support Israel—including money for missile defense systems, weapons, and humanitarian assistance—in “its effort to defend itself against Iran and its proxies,” and $8.1 billion to counter China’s activities in the Indo-Pacific region. The Ukraine bill passed by a 311-112 margin, with all House Democrats in favor of the measure and most Republicans against it. The vote for assistance to Israel was 366 to 58.  

The House also voted 360-58 to pass the national security bill 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, which experts and US government officials say the changes have less to do with Texas than with seasonal migratory patterns and more strict crackdowns from Mexico. It included sanctions on Iran, seizure of frozen Russian assets, and the crackdown on TikTok. Supporters of the ban say the video platform represents a national security threat because China could potentially access user data and even interfere with US elections. In March, the House passed on a 352-65 bipartisan vote a stand-alone version of the TikTok ban dubbed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” that got stalled in the Senate.

“It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the US economy, annually,” TikTok said in an online statement earlier this week. 

They carried vinyl banners that read “Justice for Migrants” and “Give Back Shelby Park,” a reference to the 47-acre field on the banks of the Rio Grande named after a Confederate general that Abbot and his $10 billion Operation Lone Star have turned into a razor wire-enclosed outpost for Texas state forces. On the Mexico side, a sign in Spanish warns potential crossers of the dangers of the floating barrier made of buoys with sharp metal disks between them: “People have died; look for another path, please.” 

“There’s so much concertina here, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to rescue the river,” Rubin says of the wire-fencing Gov. Abbott put up along the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from crossing. “It’s quite something to see.” Another sight to behold is the militarized presence of a plethora of law enforcement agencies crowding that sliver of the 2,000-mile long US-Mexico border. Besides US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Texas National Guard, state troopers from as far away as Florida and Missouri have been sent to deal with the supposed “invasion” decried by Republican governors. But in the face of a decrease in migrant crossings, these heavily armed law enforcement personnel are finding little in the form of an enemy to fight.

“We stand here, we watch and we tell the immigrants to turn around,” a Louisiana soldier dressed in body armor told NOLANews. If a migrant manages to come through the barrier, they contact the Texas Department of Public Safety (TDPS) which then calls CBP. “They’re running up and down the river on airboats,” Rubin says. “They don’t have much to do at all. There’s not a lot going on.”

Migrant encounters with US law enforcement in the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass, peaked in December at 71,000, but have slowed dramatically since then. In March, those encounters dropped to 11,000. Gov. Abbot and the TDPS have taken credit for the sharp drop. “Our stiff resistance is working,” the Texas governor wrote on X in February. But experts and US government officials say the changes have less to do with Texas than with seasonal migratory patterns and more strict crackdowns from Mexico.

“It’s interesting to hear the state of Texas taking credit for the decrease when so much of its security presence in Eagle Pass now also existed in December,” one Department of Homeland Security official told the Washington Post. Mexico, Rubin says, is “doing the work Greg Abbott is taking credit for.” 

Eagle Pass, the seat of Maverick County, has emerged as the epicenter of a political and constitutional standoff between Texas and the federal government. Last year, Texas sued the Biden administration after Border Patrol agents cut parts of the concertina wire to respond to medical emergencies, claiming the cutting “disrupted the State’s border security efforts.” In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Biden administration, allowing federal officials to remove parts of the barrier. That same month, three migrants—a woman and two children—drowned after the Texas National Guard seized control of Shelby Park and prevented US Border Patrol, which conducts migrant rescues, from accessing the area. 

Maverick County has seen a record number of migrant deaths, resulting in a shortage of body bags and corpses being left in fridges for months, the Washington Post recently reported. In 2022, CBP reported 895 migrant deaths at the southern border—256 were in the Del Rio sector, more than any other area. 

Meanwhile, the Texas Military Department is building a massive 80-acre base camp near Eagle Pass to hold up to 2,300 members of the National Guard that could cost taxpayers as much as $500 million. Troops will have access to a dining facility serving chef-prepared and buffet style meals, a fitness center, and basketball and volleyball courts, according to a contractor’s proposal reviewed by the Texas Observer. During the vigil, Rubin and other volunteers got a glimpse of the under-construction site, but they were told to leave the premises. From what he could gather, “it’s a very unpleasant place,” 

During such moments, one could be led to ponder things greater than our mere human experience: the cosmos, fate, and the vastness of the universe. Or, if you’re Fox News, you could do this:

Let's see how Fox News is covering today's eclipse.

Dana Perino: "Fox News alert! A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground. The southern border is directly in the path of totality today when the moon covers the sun." pic.twitter.com/5bDhjEQNqY

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 8, 2024

“A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground,” anchor Dana Perino told viewers. “The southern border will be directly in the path of totality today when the moon covers the sun for nearly four minutes.” The eclipse, co-anchor Bill Hemmer then added, represents “a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in.” 

The truth about the “opportunity” is a bit less chaotic. There have been warnings of heavy traffic at both the border in the north and south because (of course) people are traveling to see the eclipse. There’s nothing particularly esoteric or conspiratorial about border-crossers making moves to try and catch a glimpse of the astronomical phenomenon.

Still, that didn’t stop Fox. They showed a map of the total eclipse’s path that transitioned into images from the weekend of supposed migrants in New Mexico, a Fox News reporter talked about “suspected cartels’ scouts and coyotes watch[ing] from a mountain above.” 

Fox News wasn’t alone in making the wild connection between the eclipse and migration to the southern border. In a segment with Arizona Sheriff Mark Lamb, a Republican running for the US Senate, a Newsmax host asked if the over three-minute darkness following the eclipse posed “any concern that there could be a rush on the border during that time.” Sheriff Lamb, a frequent guest on the right-wing media circle and harsh critic of the Biden administration’s border policies, gave the only conceivable answer: “Look, it gets dark every night.” 

There is one kind of discussion over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, with critics across the spectrum debating the efficacy and benefits of such programs. And then there is Heritage’s view: that DEI is a hidden agenda pushed by the Black Lives Matter movement—the plan of “committed Marxists nursed by an international network” who are “dedicated to overthrowing America and its entire system.” 

This ignores that, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written in the New Yorker, DEI is often a “popular tool of the upper management of businesses and universities [adopted] after the so-called racial reckoning of the summer of 2020” to quell frustrations—and “hardly constitutes a theory, an ideology, or a political movement.” (Many on the left even say it is, in fact, the corporatization of more radical strains of anti-racism.) But at Heritage and in other conservative circles, a potential compromising of leftist values is being touted as proof that the Reds have won and enshrined their agenda.

Speakers at the event made the case that DEI and Critical Race Theory (CRT) have metastasized like cancer across every fiber of American society: from high schools, to colleges, to corporations, and even to the military. In their view, left-leaning ideologies that pit oppressors against the oppressed are replacing empathy and patriotism with anger and divisiveness. DEI is a “Frankenstein monster” under the bed.

But it isn’t all despair. They also celebrated that, as one of the moderators put it, “DEI is on the run.” Even Hollywood is turning against it, Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, claimed, saying that American Fiction—an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure—was an “anti-DEI” movie. “I find that reading of the film and my novel incorrect and offensive,” Everett told me in an email. “The right-wing, in fascist form, will take the slightest critique of a complicated subject and run with it. It takes a lot to misread so badly, but the educated followers of such people will, sadly, buy into it.” (Gonzalez clarified to me he “should have said that the movie was anti-woke” as it “questioned many of the tired shibboleths of wokeism.”)

The conservative obsession with DEI should be taken seriously. At the event I attended, there was no direct mention of the Project 2025 playbook for a second Donald Trump term. But the panelists—a mix of Heritage Foundation fellows and conservative activists—revealed their aspirations to dismantle and divest institutions, and eliminate guardrails for social and racial progress.

For over two hours, they talked about taking the American Bar Association “out of law schools,” getting rid of “agitators” (aka chief diversity officers), and cutting off DEI programs entirely. If DEI was not ousted, funding should be pulled away from universities and towards, conveniently, organizations like the Heritage Foundation. “If you hit them with the money they will change,” Jay P. Greene, a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, said of universities. “And if you take some heads—so getting some presidents out—that also will produce change.”

In Heritage’s 920-page Project 2025 manifesto endorsed by about 100 right-wing organizations and filled with contributions by Trump loyalists, the group suggests the next conservative presidential administration “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for culture warriors” and proposes removing terms such as gender equality, DEI, abortion, and reproductive rights from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

It also calls for: amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to prevent the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting data on race and ethnicity; doing away with disparate impact legal theory; limiting the applications of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that established Title VII protections for employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and rescinding regulations that bar discrimination based on “sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

Christopher Rufo—who helped launch an overt campaign to rebrand CRT and DEI and publicly pushed for the resignation of Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay—didn’t attend the event, but he was represented by his right-hand man and chief of staff Armen Tooloee. In true Rufo fashion, Tooloee laid out their “deliberate strategy” clearly: To publicize the “most egregious” examples of DEI in universities and “create this illusion that we have eyes and ears everywhere.” (Toolee said one of his tasks for doing this included doing Google searches on universities’ domains for mentions of “George Floyd.”)

“The strategy we had behind it was we timed it out to be going on during the legislative session in Florida specifically,” Tooloee said of their initial focus on Florida and Texas universities, “because we knew we had buy-in from the state government and from Governor [Ron] DeSantis that this was something they wanted to move on but they needed political cover basically because you know if you start targeting diversity and inclusion you’re going to get an enormous backlash in the press.” 

For all the backlash, this histrionic crusade and “gotcha” denunciation of DEI has found powerful adherents. Most notably, billionaires Bill Ackman and Elon Musk. Now, Heritage and its allies are betting on the 2024 elections to take their playbook nationally. “[We] get a bigger majority in the House, get the Senate, get a President Trump who really loves our country…,” Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah said at the event. “20 months and we’ll be exposing so much more and turning this whole thing around.”