But this was the catalyst for everything that followed since. It triggered a public backlash that drew enormous attention to his claims and his candidacy and, instead of backing down on the falsehoods that drew the attention to the comments, he made immigration and its purported dangers a centerpiece of his campaign. As has so often been the case, he and rhetoric from Fox News were pointed in the same direction in an effort to appeal to the same audience. Fearmongering about immigrants and crime got views and it got votes, and so it got deployed.
A bit over eight years later, Trump is again running for president, and he and his allies — now far more beholden to him than they were back in June 2015 — are again focused heavily on the dangers of immigrants. The increase in people entering the United States over the Mexico border has been fodder for right-wing media for months now, with Republicans clearly eyeing the issue as useful for the upcoming general election.
Discussions about the border are generally framed in frightening (if not apocalyptic) terms, with both old favorites — terrorists are sneaking in! — and new rhetoric — many of them are military-aged males! — helping to color perceptions of the issue. And of course, to color how voters view President Biden or his all-but-certain challenger in November, Donald Trump.
Fox News had played a predictably central role here. Since Biden took office, Fox News has mentioned “migrants” or “immigrants” almost five times as often on average as CNN has. Fox News has mentioned “crime” 2½ times as often each month on average, despite crime rates dropping over the past two years.
Fox News also talks about “crime” and “migrants” together more often. So far in 2024, Fox News has mentioned both subjects in the same 30-second period more than 150 times. CNN and MSNBC have done so about 30 times — cumulatively.
But the right-wing channel knows what its audience wants, just as it did back in 2015. So, on Tuesday night, host Sean Hannity began by lamenting how dangerous New York City had become thanks to the influx of immigrants.
The “disastrous illegal immigration policies” of Mayor Eric Adams (D), Hannity claimed, “are wreaking havoc all over New York City.” After suggesting that Adams blamed racism for criticism of his performance, Hannity teased an upcoming interview with Curtis Sliwa, the founder of anti-crime organization Guardian Angels, to discuss the subject.
It is important to understand Sliwa’s role here. Back in the 1970s, during an era in which crime was rampant in the city, Sliwa started the Guardian Angels to serve as a civilian-centered backstop to the overwhelmed New York Police Department. The group often tipped over into vigilantism, and Sliwa would later admit that he invented some of its successes for public-relations value.
Sliwa is a character from the old days of New York City, the era in which Trump and former mayor Rudy Giuliani were ascendant. In recent years, he’s joined them politically and rhetorically. He ran against Adams for mayor in 2021 as a Republican, with Giuliani often appearing at his side. The Guardian Angels had a bit of a rebirth as crime rose in New York in the wake of the pandemic and Sliwa tried to parlay concerns about crime into political power. He failed. Adams won. Crime dropped.
But here he was on Fox News on Tuesday night, live from Times Square. Around him stood a number of Guardian Angels in the group’s trademark red berets and red jackets. Sliwa’s red jacket, though, advertised something else: Sliwa for Mayor.
Hannity jumped right in, teeing up Sliwa to go after Adams and to talk about immigrants and crime. He mentioned video — hyped relentlessly by Fox — showing several immigrants scuffling with police.
“Curtis,” he prompted, “[are] things getting better in New York City?”
As you’d expect, Sliwa did not think they are. He bashed Adams in hyperbolic and inaccurate terms, specifically on his handling of immigrants.
“This mayor just doesn’t seem to get it. He takes care of the illegal aliens and forsakes his own people,” he said, “especially the African American poor and impoverished, who elected him mayor of the city of New York over me, Curtis Sliwa.” Politics and immigration, intertwined.
As he got done speaking, the Guardian Angels standing around him began to walk off-screen. Hannity asked a question about a pilot program from the city aimed at reducing the cost of feeding recently arrived migrants, but Sliwa directed his attention to a scuffle behind the camera.
“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys right here on the corner of 42nd and Seventh,” Sliwa said. “They’ve taken over!”
The audio dropped out. Several people in red jackets could be seen grabbing and wrestling with a man wearing glasses and a jacket. After a few seconds, Hannity cut away to a different story.
But he welcomed Sliwa back at the end of the show to explain what happened.
“Well, he had been shoplifting first,” Sliwa claimed. “The Guardian Angels spotted him, stopped him. He resisted. And let’s just say we gave him a little pain compliance.” Hannity chuckled. “His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations. He’s sucking concrete. The cops scraped off the asphalt.”
He went on like this for a bit, coming back to the main point.
“You shoplift, you commit crime, you assault people: You don’t belong in our country,” Sliwa said. “And we’re going to make sure you pay a price for that.”
What Sliwa asserted, though, is not at all what happened. The New York Police Department did detain the man attacked by the Guardian Angels. They told the New York Post that the man had not been shoplifting but simply heckling the Guardian Angels during the Fox News shot. On Wednesday afternoon, the NYPD reported that the man was also not a migrant but a New Yorker from the Bronx.
Sliwa told the Associated Press that he believed the man to be an immigrant because he was speaking Spanish. About a quarter of New York City residents primarily speak Spanish.
Let’s work backward to determine why that guy from the Bronx ended up being thrown to the ground by Sliwa’s allies, why he unwittingly became the live-streamed face of immigrant crime in New York City. He was allegedly interrupting the Fox News live shot (though no disturbance was obvious during Sliwa’s initial interview), something that wouldn’t have happened had Fox News not been there. Fox News was there to have the right-wing leader of a vigilante organization opine on the dangers posed to the city by crime and immigrants to host Sean Hannity. That Hannity has long been close to Trump, the guy perhaps most invested in promoting the link between crime and immigration, may not be a coincidence.
All of this could have been worse. The guy who was roughed up by the Guardian Angels could have been seriously hurt, for example. This week saw an extreme example of how anti-immigrant rhetoric can trigger a potentially violent response, with the arrest of a Tennessee man who allegedly planned to head to the border with explosives to serve as a sniper.
That Fox News carried the scuffle live was a function of a number of bad decisions, certainly. But all of them were downstream from the same point of origin: wanting to cast New York City, once again, as collapsing metropolis overrun by criminal immigrants.
Or, as was actually the case, with hecklers from the Bronx.
