Less than a week before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump posted an ad to his Twitter account showing Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican citizen and drug dealer, admitting to killing two police officers, adding that he would “break out soon and kill more.” The footage comes from a 2014 case in Sacramento, California.
The intent of this ad was clearly to increase turnout in voters who stand by Trump’s hard stance against immigration by making them fear the possibility of newly elected Democrats. The ad attempts to paint Bracamontes as an example of what immigrants will do if allowed past the border, implying that many other immigrants from Mexico and Central America would come to the U.S. to commit violent crimes. On top of this, the ad pins blame on Democrats for allowing this to happen, though it draws no connection to a specific policy or decision to back this up.
The claims made in the ad are easily shown to be untrue: Bracamontes was deported in 1997, while Bill Clinton was in office, and arrested a year later on drug charges in Arizona. He was then released by Joe Arpaio, a Republican. This objectively shows a reversal of the claim that “Democrats let him stay.”
Beyond the factual inaccuracies, the ad is also rooted in xenophobia and racism. It pairs the court statements with footage of large groups of immigrants, many of whom are fleeing their country to escape violent drug dealers like Bracamontes. Rather than acknowledging the reasons these people are leaving their homes, it chooses to conflate them with groups that commit crimes, which many of them have witnessed or were victims of.
Using minority groups as political scapegoats is, unfortunately, not a new tactic in political ads. In 1988, an advertisement supporting George H. W. Bush focused on opposing Democrat Michael Dukakis’ policy toward prison reform. It specifically focused on the story of William Horton, a black man who was serving a life sentence for murder when Dukakis implemented a weekend furlough program. Rather than returning from his furlough, he used his freedom to perform armed robbery, murder and rape. Like the Bracamontes ad, the crime in question did in fact occur, but both ads serve a double purpose.
On the surface, the ads criticize the opposing party by revealing the consequences of their policies. The other, more subversive intent of these ads is to give a face to a hypothetically larger swarm of boogeymen. The Horton ad intentionally played to the stereotype of criminals as being intimidating black men, in the same way that this new ad uses Bracamontes as the face of Trump’s “rapists and killers” from Mexico. While the Horton ad bolstered itself on racist subtext, Trump’s ad actively uses the criminal in question to implicate a larger group of immigrants. His campaign has held immigration as its key issue from the beginning, and his blatant disdain for immigrants has been the source of wave after wave of controversy.
The ad was removed from Facebook and NBC on Nov. 6. Even Fox News, with its precedent of standing behind Trump, recognized the racism and has had it taken off its network. In isolation, ads like this serve only to disparage the opposition to win more votes. Nothing is truly contained, though, especially in politics.
This ad plays a role in a much larger conversation about immigration policy and rising nationalism in the U.S., relying on fear mongering of Republican voters. This propaganda piece ignores vital facts that invalidate its claims and, in the process, deepens prejudice toward an incredibly vulnerable group of refugees escaping the same problems they are expected to cause. Threatening voters with a tide of dangerous immigrants is insensitive and explicitly racist. For them, violence is not a threat, but a reality.
Photo from @realdonaldtrump on Twitter
