Right-wing media seeks scare clicks in the jungle
Outlets flooding migrant crossing, looking to distort perception in U.S.
Ayub Ibrahim had just walked out of the jungle. His feet still ached. A month earlier, he had left his home in Somalia, fleeing a civil war, he said, traveling first to Turkey, then Brazil and finally crossing on foot through a 66-mile expanse of wilderness known as the Darién Gap.
Resting in the sweltering San Vicente migrant camp in Panama with hundreds of other recent arrivals, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a half-dozen Americans with video cameras.
“Do you guys like Ilhan Omar?” one person asked. “What do you think about Joe Biden?”
Ibrahim, 20, answered the questions. He said he liked and admired Omar, the first Somali American to serve in Congress. He doesn’t follow U.S. politics, he added, but thinks Biden is a good president. When asked if Biden or former President Donald Trump would be better for immigrants, he chose Biden.
Later, Ibrahim would say he had felt ambushed and confused by the questions. He hadn’t intended to make a political statement. But by then, it was too late.
One of his questioners, Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist and former Republican candidate for Congress, had already posted an edited video of the conversation online. It had rocketed around the internet, amassing nearly 2 million views on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The caption read: “Somali illegal aliens proclaim support for Ilhan Omar and Joe Biden inside Panama migrant camp!”
As immigration becomes a dominant issue in the 2024 presidential race, right-wing media has been awash in gritty and often deceptive videos of migrants emerging from the Darién Gap, a roadless stretch of Panamanian jungle that has become a bottleneck for thousands of people on their way to the United States.
The clips are presented as proof of what Republicans often describe as an “invasion” of Muslim terrorists, Chinese spies and Latin American criminals. Posted widely on social media, the videos blame Biden for the migration and suggest, falsely, that Democrats are encouraging it to create new, illegal voters. International aid organizations are cast as profiteers making money off human misery.
Videos and other content made by the visitors have come to serve as a kind of B-roll footage accompanying conversations about immigration on Fox News, Tucker Carlson’s online show and even for Trump himself.
The Times followed one group as it toured camps on the edge of the Darién Gap, observing and recording as participants interviewed migrants and shot video. The reporters, producers and influencers gravitated toward migrants from Africa, China and the Middle East, barraging them with politically loaded questions.
Their posts amplified what they perceived as gotcha moments while dismissing answers that appeared to challenge their preconceptions.
The focus on Muslim and Chinese migrants may create a distorted impression. Roughly 90% of the 520,000 people who crossed through the Darién Gap last year were South Americans and Caribbeans.
The number of migrants from Africa, China and the Middle East coming through the Darién Gap has boomed in the past two years, but is less than 8% of the total.
Clips of migrants in Panama have become weapons in the information battle being waged over immigration, experts said. The content, looped again and again online, is highly effective, particularly in creating the perception of the threat of violence, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political science professor at George Mason University who has studied social media’s impact on immigration.
The images, she noted, tend to focus on young men while excluding women and children, who might generate more sympathetic responses. The migrants are often referred to as “military-aged men” and “invaders” and their claims of political or religious persecution at home are often dismissed as scripted falsehoods.
“This is straight from the textbook for how you build a narrative,” Correa-Cabrera said.