image credit : Nbc news

In mid-May, a group of Hispanic day laborers were given $20 each to parade in front of the White House with banners reading “I Love Biden” and “I Need a Work Permit for My Family.”
Nick Shirley, a pro-Trump online influencer who frequently asks migrants on camera if they like Democratic President Joe Biden or think he made it easier for them to come to the United States, organized the hoax.
“We want to take you to the White House,” Shirley told the men he recruited in a Home Depot parking lot, where day laborers typically wait for jobs, in a video later shared on YouTube.
Shirley, a 22-year-old social media influencer with over 318,000 followers, is part of a new class of Trump supporters who are shaping the immigration debate as the US election campaign heats up.
Their self-shot broadcasts from American cities and the southern border with Mexico depict illegal immigration as dangerous and burdensome as part of a strategy to increase Democratic voter turnout.
Biden took office in 2021 intending to undo much of Trump’s draconian border policies. Still, he has grappled with record numbers of migrants apprehended illegally crossing the US-Mexico border during his tenure.

While Shirley began making prank movies as a high school student in Utah and has just recently focused on illegal immigration, other pro-Trump influencers are more established and clearly partisan.
Ben Bergquam, a self-described opinion journalist who broadcasts the TV program “Law and Border” on Real America’s Voice internet media platform and frequently appears on a show with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, is one of the most noticeable.

Bergquam frequently associates immigration with crime, another prominent theme of Trump’s campaign, despite the fact that many academics who study the subject say there is no proof that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans.

Speaking into his camera moments before, the 41-year-old had assumed a less pleasant tone, referring to migrants landing illegally in the United States as an “invasion” and claiming they were driving an increase in violence.
Later that day, Bergquam blasted Biden for bringing in migrants who couldn’t support themselves, including moms with little children and “young thugs out in the street.”

“I am not blaming the people who are coming. But I blame the individuals who invited them.
Bergquam’s claim about violence is unsupported by crime statistics from New York City, which has taken in nearly 202,000 migrants since the Republican-led state of Texas started busing them across the southern border in 2022.
According to New York City Police Department statistics, arrests for severe offenses in the city increased in 2022, remained stable in 2023, and somewhat decreased in 2024.
When asked about the absence of evidence of a spike in violence, Arkansas-based Bergquam claimed that migrant crimes are underreported, blaming the NYPD’s policy of not questioning criminal suspects or victims about their legal status. He contended that stricter laws might stop any crimes committed in the United States by illegal immigrants.