Inside Trump World’s Plans To Gloss Up Mass Deportations

DURING HIS FIRST TERM IN OFFICE, Donald Trump’s immigration agenda was upended when widely circulated footage of children in cages made crystal clear what his administration’s family-separation policy really meant.

Now, as Trump starts checking off everything on his immigration policy bucket list, his backers are worried that a public relations backlash could derail his agenda a second time.

In an effort to get ahead of such a scenario, Trump’s team has deployed a massive public-relations effort to put a deeply patriotic gloss on their policy, with cabinet officials cosplaying as body-armor-wearing ICE agents and TV personalities being brought along during the agency’s raids. They’re also trying to condition supporters and the public to not go wobbly when troubling footage does inevitably surface.

When MAGA booster Benny Johnson recently posted a video of internet personality Theo Von joking about someone’s deportation, one of his followers online rushed to urge people not to be shaken by the response from those who might find the footage offensive.

“We’re going to have to suck it up, it’s really going to get tough,” she wrote, before deleting her comment. “They will tug at our emotions. Stand strong, America! It’s for the greater good.”

The rush to create multimedia narratives around—and condition the public to accept—their harsh immigration policies marks one of the most concrete differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. It also underscores MAGA’s allegiance to at least one conservative dictum that antedates Trump: politics is downstream from culture.

The spin effort includes Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem donning ICE gear, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visiting the border, and Dr. Phil accompanying ICE agents during raids around Chicago—but it also goes far beyond them.

Steve Cortes, the MAGA-friendly businessman who served as a spokesman for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns, is hitting the road from south Texas to Phoenix, Arizona, Chicago, and more to shoot mini-documentaries on the threat that illegal immigration poses to American citizens.

“It’s not enough to win the campaign—we have to keep campaigning effectively for our agenda,” Cortes told The Bulwark. “On immigration, we know the playbook of Democrats and legacy media will be that immigration enforcement is racist and Trump is a racist leader. We have to have a counterargument.”

Cortes is beginning in Starr County, Texas, home to 75,000 residents. Some 97 percent of them identify as Latino, which gives it the distinction of being the most Hispanic county in America. Trump won Starr County in November after losing it by 60 points in 2016. That month, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered 1,400 acres of land in the county to Trump to use for the “construction of deportation facilities.”

Cortes is doing this work under the umbrella of his organization, the League of American Workers, and said he will focus on the role illegal immigration played in Starr County’s swing toward Trump. After that, he’s headed to Phoenix, where he’s creating content on the issue of “illegal migrant crime” and Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs, whom he called “derelict” on the issue. From there, Cortes said that he’ll head to Chicago to look at how migrants have affected the longtime sanctuary city.

Cortes’s work is meant to advance the narrative, now set in the concrete of official government policy, that our country is being “invaded,” and that the threat posed by migrants is serious and ongoing. He intends to target everyday Americans on Facebook and X who have been conditioned by Trump’s rhetoric to understand the border as a warzone and migrants as criminals. In one video about “Bad Hombres”—a term Trump first used to talk about bad people coming across the southern border, but which Cortes has repurposed to mean “badass Hispanic men”—Cortes reads off the names of Latino U.S. Marines killed in an attack outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, which he blamed on Joe Biden’s “botched” Afghanistan withdrawal. His point was that there are good, “tough” Hispanics, too, and Democrats have hurt them.

As attested in some of his other videos, Cortes has no problem being shameless to make his point. At last year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he tried to bring a young man he described as a Venezuelan migrant named Edwin to meet “his new friends”—in this case, Democrats whom Cortes accuses of wanting open borders. When Edwin is asked for a credential by security, Cortes hams it up for the camera: “You mean he needs credentials and permission to come in to get past the wall? It’s like a border wall in a way, huh?”

When asked, Cortes declined to say whether Edwin was paid to take part in the video.

In another video in front of the border wall, Cortes says, with dire gravitas: “I’m coming to you from a crime scene.”

On Elon Musk’s X, notorious for its inflated video-view stats, the three videos described above have registered 340,000, 1.7 million, and 191,000 views, respectively. On Facebook, they range anywhere from 2,000 to 15,000 views.

Cortes says his latest mini-documentaries are designed to head off media efforts to make Trump’s mass deportation plan “kids in cages 2.0” and “shame” the administration and its MAGA supporters “into backing down on immigration.”

He acknowledged that photos and videos of enforcement actions will tug on our humanity.

“Corporate media will come up with powerful imagery—there’s going to be some bad scenes when cops have to get dangerous people, there are sad scenes when a dad gets ripped from his children. It’s sad, whether it’s a U.S. citizen or illegal alien,” he said. “But there’s a human cost of tolerating an open border, and I believe it’s politically really necessary for us to promote our own narrative.”

As Cortes, other MAGA influencers, and the Trump administration itself ramp up efforts to frame the narrative over mass deportation, it raises the question: What are Democrats doing to tell stories on immigration from their point of view?

REP. JOAQUIN CASTRO (D-Texas), the vice chair of diversity and inclusion for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who has pushed Hollywood on the importance of films telling Latino stories, told The Bulwark that Democrats must respond to these PR initiatives by offering compelling stories of their own.

“We have to give life to the arguments we’re making and the stories we’re telling and show how immigration has been a good thing for this country,” he said. “How the economy would not thrive the way it does but for immigrant labor in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, but also Florida and elsewhere. An earnest showing of that would be helpful for the country.”

When I reached out to Colin Rogero, who served as a media consultant for the Kamala Harris presidential campaign as well as Ruben Gallego’s successful Senate campaign in Arizona, and told him what Cortes was doing, he muttered “Damn it” under his breath.

Rogero said he has been pitching a remarkably similar docuseries idea (in terms of subject and form but not ideological point of view) to foundations and liberal funders out of a conviction that it is hugely important for Democrats to tell stories about the cruelty of Trump’s deportations. Just as we saw from the response to Trump bringing up the lie of Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats during his debate with Harris, Rogero said, a series that counts the human costs of a mass deportation policy could resonate beyond the communities most directly affected by Trump’s orders.

“I want to tell the counternarrative. You may have voted for Trump, whether you’re Hispanic, white, or black, and you assumed the deportation efforts were going to focus on ‘bad hombres,’ to use their stupid fucking language,” Rogero said. “But instead they’re going to go after your neighbor who goes by George, but his name is Jorge—a father who’s now headed to detention, leaving his family behind.”

Rogero argues that conservatives figured out years ago that they were moving a lot of things through Congress that were “not that popular” and then catching backlash after being called out by the media for it. So they decided to take control of media platforms in addition to building out independent ones. He said this effort includes everything from Fox News to Sinclair Broadcasting and now X.

“I have to be honest, I think the tactic of them already going out to produce content to support the president’s agenda is very, very smart,” he said.

Andres Ramirez, a longtime Democratic strategist in Las Vegas who served as an informal adviser to the Obama administration on legislative efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, said Democrats persistently fail to take their message to voters where they are.

“We have stopped talking to people; we have taken communities for granted. At the same time, Republicans have ramped it up, and then we wonder why our folks don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

Ramirez stressed that the party needs to understand that media consumption habits are shifting. And as people like Cortes are working to reach audiences in new ways, Democrats need to become more proactive and creative in countering Trump’s mass-deportation agenda—or they risk losing the argument for good.

“Has it hurt Democrats that we are not effectively communicating and reaching these audiences?” he asked. “The answer is yes.”

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