The Media Isn’t Ready for Trump’s Mass Deportation Moment

“This is not a border story—it’s a national story.”

(Photo by Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO: Department of Homeland Security agents storm a meatpacking plant in the South, a show of force in the largest workplace raid in a decade. Rounding up workers, they target those who appear to be Latinos, without regard for citizenship. They don’t ask for documentation until hours later.

A worker, overcome by fear, makes a run for it and is tackled by immigration agents, with one putting a boot on the worker’s neck for over 20 seconds, as a video of the encounter shows.

You don’t have to imagine this as some far-flung dystopian scenario that could happen in Trump’s second term because it happened during his first, in Tennessee in 2018. But that raid was not the end of the story. After it took place, the National Immigration Law Center joined forces with the Southern Poverty Law Center and an outside law firm on behalf of seven workers who were racially profiled and experienced excessive force. They were certified as a class of around 100 workers in the lawsuit, eventually winning a $1.175 million settlement in 2022 that required the U.S. government to pay the plaintiffs $475,000.

As Trump prepares to take power once more, a constellation of immigrant-rights advocates are preparing for moments like the one that took place in Tennessee. They’re also prepping a game plan to fight back, one that will elevate and amplify those instances in which the administration crosses the line into unconstitutional and unlawful actions.

The fear they have is that the media isn’t up to the task—that the cable networks and news organizations that covered Trump’s lawlessness in the past have already been cowed by the swaggering incoming administration. These feelings aren’t just coming from the advocacy world, either. They’re coming from inside the house.

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In private conversations with The Bulwark, employees within major newsrooms from ABC News to NBC News, Univision, and the Washington Post expressed doubts as to whether the media is ready to meet this moment.

One veteran NBC News journalist described concerns that the network’s mass deportation coverage would focus on b-roll of immigrants at the border, when the story will largely unfold in the interior of the country: from meatpacking plants to the cities and communities where they live.

“When we keep showing the border, we show that we don’t get it,” the source said. “Stop showing just the border—show churches, show schools, show hospitals.”

“We’ve done a poor job of covering immigration, historically,” Enrique Acevedo, a top Univision talent who interviewed Donald Trump and hosted both the incoming president and Kamala Harris for network town halls during 2024, told The Bulwark. “Most news platforms in the U.S. have focused on what happens at the border and done very little to understand the complexities of immigration coverage. Covering the border to explain our immigration crisis is like covering an ER to explain the COVID pandemic.”

Acevedo added a warning: “This is not a border story—it’s a national story that will have economic impact on entire industries, from food processing to meatpacking plants in Iowa and Nebraska far away from the border. It’s a story about how communities will be ripped apart, with an undocumented community that is overwhelmingly Mexican.”

“The humanitarian catastrophe that deportations will undoubtedly lead to is a story we’re not prepared to cover.”

Paola Ramos, an MSNBC and Telemundo contributor whose book Defectors looked at how some Latinos have embraced the far right, said it was the images and reporting during Trump’s first term “that moved a white mother in Ohio to feel for a mother at the border.” The question, Ramos said, was, “Can we get back to that?”

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PERHAPS NO OTHER POLICY ISSUE is as affected by the editorial decision making of the political press as immigration. A number of presidents have the scars to prove it.

Back in 2014, Barack Obama created an immigration enforcement blueprint to deal with the influx of thousands of unaccompanied minors, much like Trump did during his first term when he instituted a family-separation policy. Both men were pummeled with bad press over the humanitarian fallout that followed. It was a PR nightmare for each.

Outside groups, keenly aware of how footage of kids in cages began to turn the tide of public opinion harshly against the first Trump White House, are already making plans to try and place the spotlight on excesses of the second term.

Kica Matos, the head of the National Immigration Law Center, has quietly mobilized her organization to prepare to fight mass deportation in the courts and in the press, starting after Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, laid out the plans in a November 2023 New York Times article. She told The Bulwark that one of the biggest challenges for the immigrant-rights movement is that they “don’t do a good enough job talking to people who don’t know what the fuck is going on” when it comes to mass deportations.

Polls have shown that while a plurality of Americans say they support mass deportations, advocates say voters don’t fully understand what it entails or don’t believe Trump will go through with the most extreme version. Groups are ready to share the stories of what is happening inside communities, but Matos said much depends on whether the media—hollowed out by cuts—will devote the adequate resources.

“I don’t think Americans understand what’s coming,” she said. “I would bet a majority of Americans would be shocked when some of their friends are deported. Or the parents of the best friend of their child. I want those stories told, too.”

Fearing that traditional media may not be up to the challenge of telling the mass deportation story comprehensively, immigrant rights advocates are turning to social media channels. Anabel Mendoza, the communications director for advocacy organization United We Dream, said her undocumented and youth-led group will put a face to mass deportation through videos on platforms young people use like Instagram and TikTok. The group’s political arm, United We Dream Action, made a six-figure radio ad buy in the fall along with partners telling the story of young DACA recipient named Edder, who is identified only by his first name and was deported and separated from his family during Trump’s first term. The story, told through his cousin Alejandra, aired on podcasts and streaming platforms in six states aimed at young people ages 18 to 30.

Republicans are preparing for this type of push. But they are also confident that it won’t have a significant impact.

Ryan Girdusky, a former JD Vance adviser who remains friendly with the incoming vice president, disputed the idea that footage of kids in cages or families being separated meaningfully changed public opinion against Trump in his first term.

“When people hear ‘mass deportation,’ they think Elian Gonzalez hiding in a closet with a gunman coming at him while he clings to a family member’s arms, but that’s not what mass deportation is,” Girdusky told The Bulwark. “There’s a question of how effectively they’re going to do it. The most effective way is encouraging self-deportation, as well as local enforcement.”

Girdusky said that “no matter what,” the media is going to find one story of a grandmother being deported and “explode it” into a scandal. But with the media and Democrats appearing defeated in his view, he argued that Trump should move swiftly and confidently on deportations.

“It’s gotta be all gas, no brake,” he said.

Daniel Garza, the president of the conservative, Koch-backed grassroots LIBRE Initiative, which is active in Hispanic communities across the nation, said the administration will be sensitive to public perception, including visuals that could emerge of immigrants being apprehended and detained. He noted how social media platforms now make live video widely disseminated, making it more likely that dramatic visuals and confrontations could spread. But he stressed that the public is ready for what’s to come; after all, mass deportation was one of the main policies Trump promised that led to his election.

“When the rubber hits the road is [when] they’re going after people with no criminal record who are being industrious and productive in our communities, integrated into our churches, schools, and workplaces,” he said.

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SINCE TRUMP’S WIN, the incoming administration has offered mixed messaging about what exactly it means by mass deportation.

Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has pledged to steamroll sanctuary city officials who stand in his way. But on Face the Nation this past Sunday, he said Trump will concentrate on “public safety threats and national security threats.” The ICE 2024 annual report released in December showed the agency continued to prioritize its enforcement resources by arresting noncitizens with criminal convictions or pending charges and that the 81,312 noncitizens with criminal histories arrested had a combined total of 516,050 charges and/or convictions, which included serious and violent offenses like assaults, sex offenses, weapons charges, burglaries, and homicides.

As the media ramps up its coverage of Trump 2.0, the question that it must confront is not just the scope of what transpires but the frame in which the issue is presented. There is a fundamental difference between border crossings and torn-apart communities—though each qualifies as a Trump deportation policy story. Ramos, the MSNBC and Telemundo contributor, argued that the media was, to a large degree, responsible for moving the audience to the right on immigration.

“For the last couple of years we fed into this narrative of an invasion at the border, painting migrants as criminals, we fed into the idea of rising crime,” she told The Bulwark. “We have to understand we are also responsible for creating this fear-mongering, we fed into that panic.”

In this vein, she argued that accountability today will look vastly different from how it did in 2016. The larger question, perhaps, was whether there would be accountability at all.

“It’s our responsibility to undo some of that narrative and go back to humanizing these communities and individuals that will continue to be criminalized in ways that will be unprecedented,” she added. “Americans can then decide whether collectively they will feel the moral outrage of 2018 and 2019.”

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One Last Thing

As we embark on this newsletter—and, please, do share Huddled Masses with folks!—I want to give you a sense of where I’m coming from. For that, I want to share the stuff I’m reading that has stuck with me, or something I’ve heard that you should be watching for in the coming days and weeks.

I’ll start this one with an excellent Chicago Tribune piece by Laura N. Rodríguez Presa titled “Chicago Church stops hosting in-person Spanish services amid fears of mass deportations from Trump administration.”

It tells the story of Francisca Lino and her family who sat for services every Sunday but now will have to gather her family in front of a computer to watch a Spanish-language service at Lincoln United Methodist Church virtually from now on.

Emma Lozano, the pastor at Lincoln United Methodist, which has been vandalized and attacked by right-wing extremists in the past, decided to move its Spanish services online to protect its undocumented immigrant community. The services in English will remain in-person.

“We must take their threats seriously and prepare for the worst,” Lozano said.