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Republicans flood TV with misleading ads about immigration, border

More than $247 million was spent in the first six months of this year on television, streaming platform and digital ads that mention immigration, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign advertising. That is $40 million more than ads that mention any other issue.

Over 90 percent of the ads supported Republican candidates and were paid for by their campaigns or political action committees backing them.

The level of spending underscores how important Republicans view border security and immigration in this year’s elections. While polls show voters overall rank issues at the border as less important to them than the economy, inflation and protecting democracy, Republican voters consistently rank it as among the most important.

The Washington Post analyzed the transcripts, images and on-screen text featured in more than 700 campaign ads that mention immigration and that ran from January through June for the presidential and Senate races, as well as congressional primaries and major state campaigns.

Taken as a whole, the ads convey an unrealistic portrait of the border as being overrun and inaccurately characterize immigrants generally as a threat, of which there is little evidence. FBI data show U.S. border cities are among the nation’s safest. And a 2023 report from a group of economists found immigrants are at least 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born individuals.

Republicans have made issues at the border central to their attacks on Harris in her effort to win the White House, dubbing her the “border czar” of the Biden administration and blaming her for crimes committed by immigrants. As vice president, she was directed by President Joe Biden to tackle the enduring root causes of unauthorized immigration. She, however, was never put in charge of the border nor labeled a “czar.”

Democrats ran a little more than three dozen ads about immigration, compared with almost 700 for Republicans. Of those ads, the most widely aired connected the issue of migration with calls to secure the border or crack down on fentanyl and violent crime. In the ads for Democrats, few showed migrants near a border.

While candidates have more options than ever before to get their messages to voters, television ad spending still ranks high on the list of expenditures. “If campaigns didn’t believe ads can matter, they wouldn’t be spending millions on buying time to air them,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

The majority of spending — over 80 percent — went to ads that never aired in states that border Mexico. The states that saw the most money spent on immigration ads were Ohio, Indiana and Montana, which have immigrant populations well below the national average but also have high-stakes races.

Trump won all three of those states in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. And this year, all three had competitive Republicans primaries for statewide races. But Ohio and Montana are particularly important for both parties: They have two of the most hotly contested Senate races where Democratic incumbents are facing tough challenges that could determine which party controls the chamber.

Over a third of the 745 ads included depictions of Border Patrol, soldiers or the military, sometimes paired with calls to “declare war” on drug cartels.

Around 20 percent of the ads referred to migrants as “illegals” or “aliens,” with around 7 percent choosing harsher words like “trafficker,” “rapist,” or “murderer.”

And around 10 percent of the 745 ads referenced migrants as invaders or the influx of migrants as an invasion.

In contrast, just 2 percent included the words “asylum,” “refugee,” or “undocumented.” And almost all of the ads from Republicans and their aligned groups portrayed refugees or asylum seekers as dangerous threats to the country, attacking candidates for perceived support of them.

The Post analysis found that nearly 20 percent of the 745 ads use footage and photos that are outdated, lack context, or are paired with voice-overs and text that do not accurately depict what is shown on the screen.

Dozens of ads criticize the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the border, while showing chaotic scenes that were filmed in 2018 under the Trump administration. This video shows Central American migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, rushing the southern border. U.S. Border Patrol agents fired tear gas to repel the crowd, which included young children. The footage was taken during the Trump administration, but in dozens of ads, it is paired with voice-over and text tying it to Democrats. The Post reached out to the political action committees and campaigns that ran the ads shown below. None responded with a comment.

Nearly 30 percent of the ads mention cartels or drugs. MAGA Inc. and the National Republican Congressional Committee, as well as campaign committees supporting candidates in Virginia, South Carolina and Alabama, paid for ads that included visuals of cartels or anonymous gang members that are nearly a decade old; one shows a gang member interviewed by ABC News in El Salvador in 2016; another was from a 2015 book by photographer Adam Hinton that featured photographs he took in 2013 of gang members inside a prison in El Salvador.

The NRCC’s national press secretary, Will Reinert, responded to questions in a statement that didn’t address the outdated images. Instead, the statement pointed to Americans killed by migrants and said: “The Washington Post is running interference for the perpetrators instead of the victims. Pathetic.”

Photographs of MS-13 prisoners in El Salvador were taken in 2013 and used in a 2024 ad that ran supporting Rep. Jerry L. Carl and attacking Rep. Barry Moore. The two Republicans faced each other in a primary after Alabama’s congressional map was redrawn, with Moore defeating Carl.

Video from 2016 of a gang member in El Salvador was used in a 2024 ad attacking Democrat Tom Suozzi of New York, who won back his congressional seat in a special election replacing Republican George Santos.

An ad paid for by Indiana state Sen. Andy Zay used stock footage of masked men and a staged arrest scene.

The ad paid for by Zay, who ran for Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District and lost, uses stock footage of masked and armed men and a table of drugs as the words “cartels” and “human traffickers” flash on screen, as well as stock footage of an arrest, with his voice-over touting his record of having “cracked down on fentanyl dealers.” The Post reached out to Zay’s and Carl’s campaign representatives. None responded with a comment.

These ads use outdated or stock images as evidence to present migrants as violent and posing a danger to Americans. When asked about the ads analyzed by The Post, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said: “People would do well to remember they are seeing highly selected representations of immigration that are often filled with misinformation.”

TRUMP’S BORDER OBSESSION

In July, Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination and stated: “At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America.”

The Post reported in February that illegal border crossings had soared to record levels under Biden, averaging 2 million per year, from 2021 to 2023. However, after Trump rallied Republicans to defeat a bipartisan bill that would have expanded immigration enforcement, Biden tightened border restrictions. Illegal crossings have fallen in recent months to the lowest levels since 2020, according to the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

Trump has blamed Biden for inviting mass migration, and is pledging to close the border and deploy U.S. troops to carry out deportations if he’s elected in November, a position supported by most Americans in a recent poll. The same poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that Americans’ concerns about immigration have risen sharply this year, with 51 percent of Americans saying that the large number of immigrants and refugees entering the country is a “critical threat” to U.S. interests, up from 42 percent last fall to the highest level since 2010.

And while 44 percent of Americans said immigration mattered “a great deal” in their decisions of whom to vote for in the presidential election, 69 percent of Republicans said it mattered a great deal.

Trump and the Republican Party’s depiction of the border as seen in their advertising is part of a broader trend, according to Mittelstadt. “We’ve really seen, and not just in the U.S., but over the last decade, far-right, nationalist and populist parties have latched on to immigration as a very effective issue to motivate their base and turnout support.”

“Some thinking that used to be reserved for the dark places of the internet — like the great replacement theory … now you see them on the airwaves across the United States,” she said.

“Terrorists and illegal immigrants are invading our country,” a voice-over says in one characteristic ad, from a group boosting John Curtis in Utah’s Republican Senate primary. “Young women sold into prostitution, terrorists and illegal immigrants invading our country.” The Post reached out to a representative at Conservative Values for Utah for comment and did not get a response.

An ad for Senate candidate John Curtis of Utah blames Biden's border policy for prostitution, fentanyl overdoses and terrorists entering the United States. (Conservative Values for Utah)

“Drug traffickers, rapists, poisoning our country,” an ad from MAGA Inc. reads, over images of tattooed men and crowds pushing and shoving. “But Nikki Haley refused to call illegals criminals. Illegals are criminals, Nikki. That’s what illegal means.” The tattooed men were photographed in El Salvador in 2012, and there is no indication they sought to enter the United States. The crowd, filmed in 2023, was reported to have been stopped on the Mexican side of the border.

A Maga Inc.-funded ad attacks Nicki Haley on being "too weak to fix the border." (MAGA Inc.)

In another Trump ad, paid for by the Trump campaign, a voice-over warns viewers that Biden’s immigration policy “raises the possibility of a Hamas attack,” over a clip of a building being blown up. But the building shown in the ad was in Gaza, and was destroyed last year by a rocket fired from the Israeli military, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Misleading use of footage

The same airstrike is used as a stand-in for a Hamas attack. (Donald J. Trump for President 2024)

This type of visual misinformation can have a dramatic effect on viewers, experts told The Post in separate interviews. “The images tied to immigration, tend to migrate out of their context,” said Jamieson, from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “We process images more quickly than we process statements that are verbalized or that are in print. And we not only process them more immediately, we process them more viscerally.”

“Campaign ads deserve to be fact-checked” said Jacob Neiheisel, a professor at the University at Buffalo, because “campaigns themselves are inviting you to look at the images.”

Multiple ads show the same scene of migrants running at the border, paired with text on screen that gives the viewer a false impression that migrants are flooding unchecked into the United States. In the unedited video, Border Patrol agents had just instructed migrants in Lukeville, Ariz., whom they were taking to Border Patrol stations, to “start walking to the first camp,” according to a reporter who posted a minute-long video of the scene on X in December and spoke to The Post.

Misleading use of footage

The same footage is edited to avoid showing nearby Border Patrol agents. (MAGA Inc; One Nation)

In one instance, MAGA Inc. used about two seconds from that minute-long video with text running over the scene reading “Biden Admin mass releasing migrants,” falsely implying that the migrants were not under Border Patrol supervision. MAGA Inc. spent nearly $4 million running the ad for two months across Pennsylvania, according to AdImpact.

The Post reached out to a representative at MAGA Inc. for comment and did not get a response. One Nation, a conservative advocacy group, said in a statement: “One point the ad is trying to convey is that there is chaos at the border,” citing Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s votes in 2013 as a reason.

“The majority [of people] really don’t have personal experience with the border” so “all they’re left with is what they see and hear in the news and what they see and hear in these political ads and messages,” said Sarah McKinnon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who focuses on communication, immigration and politics.

TRUMP VS. HARRIS: A RACE TO BE SEEN AS TOUGHER

In the past several weeks, both the Trump and Harris campaigns released ads linking border security with gangs, drugs and violence, both attempting to be seen as tougher.

Harris’s ad calls her a “Border-State Prosecutor” that went after “border gangs” and claims as president she’ll “crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”

An ad supporting Kamala Harris praises her for going after "border gangs" and "fixing the border." (Harris for President)

Trump’s first ad after securing the Republican nomination, includes several misleading claims, and describes Harris as “America’s border czar,” a title she never held. A narrator later states, “Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here,” as five images of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border flash across the screen.

In his first campaign ad attacking Kamala Harris in her bid for president, Donald Trump tries to tie her to "America's border crisis." (Donald J. Trump for President 2024)

Four of those border-crossing scenes occurred while Trump was president. The original photos were all sourced to Getty Images; three of the photos were taken in 2018 in Tijuana. One was from 2019, taken in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Trump campaign's first ad of the 2024 general election that focused on immigration used outdated imagery, which was actually taken when Trump was in office. (Trump Campaign)

When asked about the misleading ads, a spokesperson from Trump’s campaign wrote in an email: “The Washington Post should spend less time analyzing President Trump’s ads and more time focusing on the subject matter at hand — Kamala Harris’ deadly border invasion that has allowed more than 11 million illegal people to enter our country.” The Biden administration has not admitted that many immigrants at the border. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 11 million undocumented immigrants were living in the United States as of 2022, 79 percent arriving before 2010. Biden has released more than 3.4 million migrants at the southern border to face immigration proceedings since he took office.

Since Harris secured the Democratic presidential nomination, recent data from AdImpact shows Republicans are heavily focusing on immigration and crime and accusing Harris of mishandling the U.S.-Mexico border, while Democrats are emphasizing abortion and the economy.

American politics, according to Peter Loge, director of the School of Media & Public Affairs at George Washington University, has, at some level “always been garbage. Fake pictures are just a continuation for a proud American tradition of doing anything for a vote.”

Loge added: “People are going to make good-faith mistakes. But people that work on campaigns are paid to get it right.”

Adriana Usero, Michael Cadenhead, Maria Sacchetti, Nick Miroff, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement, Dan Keating and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.

Methodology

The Washington Post analyzed 745 campaign advertisements that aired from January through June 2024 and were identified as mentioning immigration by political ads tracking firm AdImpact. The spending data is updated as of July 1 to account for all the ads that ran as of June 30.

These include ads that supported or opposed candidates for the U.S. House or Senate or in state governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, or secretary of state races.

The Post analyzed the ads with software developed in house that leverages the vision capabilities of a large language model. The tool, called Haystacker, extracts stills from video files, processes them to on-screen text and labels the objects present, such as an American flag. The text and visual information are then analyzed and verified by reporters. Analysis of language used in ads reflects both on-screen text, as extracted by The Post’s tool, and transcripts, as provided by AdImpact.

To identify instances where visuals lacked important context, The Post manually reviewed all 745 ads, and looked for images where the original source was confirmed through reverse image searches and publicly available archived websites. Only images related to immigration were included for the analysis, which is likely to be an undercount of the number of ads that used misleading visual material. Other examples, like some stock images, were not included or not successfully sourced.

About this story

Product Engineering by Yoli Martinez, Aaron Brezel, Katlyn Alo, Jake Kara, Paige Moody, Semanur Karayaka, Patrick Slawinski, Keerthy Reddy and Karen Wang.

Editing by Kainaz Amaria, Elyse Samuels and Annah Aschbrenner. Data editing by Anu Narayanswamy. Design editing by Madison Walls. Copy editing by Frances Moody.

Campaign ads referenced in top collage: Ron DeSantis for President; MAGA Inc.; One Nation; Doden for Indiana; Haley for President; Zay for Congress; Mike Braun for Indiana; NRCC/Mazi for Congress; Congressional Leadership Fund; Donald J. Trump for President 2024; Rosen for Nevada; Keystone Renewal PAC; Ron DeSantis for President; Trust in the Mission PAC; Building America’s Future; MAGA Inc.; One Nation; Republican Leadership Fund Inc.; American Prosperity Alliance; Win It Back PAC; Border Security Alliance; Secure New York State PAC; Good Fight; Dolan for Ohio; Marty for Congress; Never Back Down; Robin Ficker for U.S. Senate; MAGA Inc.; Dolan for Ohio; Shreve for Congress; Leadership for Ohio; Defend Ohio; Values PAC; Vivek 2024; MAGA Inc.; Mike Braun for Indiana; SFA Fund Inc.; Congressional Leadership Fund; Americans for Prosperity; Doden for Indiana; American Patriots PAC; SFA Fund Inc.; Trust in the Mission PAC; NRCC/Mazi for Congress; Dolan for Ohio; Conservatives for Effective Government; Nikki Haley for President; Sherry Biggs for Congress; Fight Right; Duty and Honor; Suozzi for Congress; Buckeye Leadership Fund; Never Back Down; Conservative Outsider PAC; America Leads Inc.; Leadership for Ohio Fund; Congressional Leadership Fund; Fight Right Inc.; Blake Masters for Congress; Hovde for Wisconsin; Kari Lake for Senate; Never Back Down; Defend US PAC; Donald J. Trump for President 2024; WFW Action Fund; Duty and Honor; MAGA Inc.; Buckeye Leadership Fund; Nikki Haley for President; NRCC; Congressional Leadership Fund; Tell It Like It Is PAC; Great Lakes Conservative Fund; MAGA Inc.; Keystone Renewal PAC; Donald J. Trump for President 2024