In June 2022, the man known online as “Conservative Anthony” drove me to a couple of what he calls migrant “hot spots,” by the border in El Paso, Texas. He’s made a career out of migrant hunting; he stalks and confronts people he suspects of being migrants while livestreaming the encounters on his website, Border Network News, and many social-media accounts. He has given border tours to Republican lawmakers, including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and was captured in January 6 videos chanting “Our house!” as the mob left the Capitol.
Conservative Anthony’s real name is Pedro Antonio Aguero. He was born and raised in El Paso, a child of Mexican immigrants. Like many Latinos in South Texas, he grew up a Democrat. But Aguero now believes that the Democratic Party is allowing an “invasion” across the southern border. And the popularity of his content—his followers total more than 100,000 across different social-media platforms—suggests that he’s not alone.
This essay has been adapted from Paola Ramos’s new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.Aguero is an extreme example of a broader phenomenon. Many Latinos have shifted to the right on immigration in recent years, warming up to the ideas of building a wall, shutting down the southern border, and even conducting mass deportations. Support for Donald Trump among Latino voters grew by 8 percentage points from the 2016 to the 2020 presidential election, and polls suggest that Trump continues to make inroads with Latino voters leading up to the 2024 election. Anti-immigrant sentiment often comes from a place of fear. People may be afraid that immigrants will take something from them: jobs, opportunities, or, perhaps more profoundly, a sense of their own national and cultural identity. But I have come to understand that anti-immigrant Latinos aren’t just afraid of loss. Unlike white Americans, they also have something to prove: that they, too, belong in America. “I don’t lock the doors because I hate the people outside,” Aguero told me. “I lock the doors because I love the people inside.”
[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]
Aguero’s online persona is intimidating. But when I met him, he struck me as shy. He avoided eye contact and spoke with a shaky voice and a frontero accent. He had agreed to allow me to shadow him for a couple of hours for a Vice News story. He picked me up at a gas station in El Paso. When I opened the door, I saw that a friend of his, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was sitting in the back. We’d be going on one of the surveillance runs Aguero makes along the border to get footage for his social-media channels.
“I live and breathe the border,” Aguero told me. “It makes it hard to even have a relationship or even friendships at times, because I’m just so obsessively, compulsively dedicated to this.”
As we drove, he told me about the evolution of his political views. As a young man, he had studied for a real-estate license. While at school, he’d volunteered with Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke, a fellow El Paso native. One day in class, Aguero’s professor challenged him to articulate why he was helping Beto. “I didn’t have an answer,” he told me. His professor responded with a proverb: “Dead fish go with the flow.” Aguero remembers this as the moment when he began questioning his loyalty to Democrats. He quit working for O’Rourke and eventually found a home in conservativism, and a particular interest in immigration issues.
In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center flagged Aguero’s connections to the United Constitutional Patriots, a now-defunct militia group that would detain migrant families along the New Mexico border, at times holding them at gunpoint before turning them over to law enforcement. Aguero would often patrol and post videos with UCP members, and occasionally identified himself as the group’s spokesperson.
In 2020, Aguero ran as a Republican to represent Beto’s former district, which includes most of El Paso and its suburbs. He lost the primary—by a lot. He told me that his politics don’t fit the traditional GOP framework either. Aguero blames Democrats and Republicans for the country’s immigration crisis. Both parties, Aguero believes, deceive the public, saying they “work together to control the masses.”
Riding in the car, Aguero told me that while he is patrolling remote locations, the first thing he looks for are footprints, discarded clothes, plastic water bottles, and other trash. We eventually got out of the car and followed a trail of footprints that led us into underground tunnels that smugglers and immigrants use to hide from Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side of the border. We eventually came across piles of T-shirts, candy wrappers, backpacks, and electrolyte water, all left by immigrants who had shed their belongings as they struggled to survive the desert heat. (A Swiss NGO counted more than 700 migrants who died or went missing while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, making it the world’s most lethal land crossing.)
We also found belts and shoelaces strewn across the ground, indicating Border Patrol apprehensions. When undocumented immigrants are caught, agents typically have them remove their laces and belts—items that are deemed dangerous because they can be used as weapons or to commit suicide—before escorting them to detention centers.
Despite Aguero’s vigilance, we didn’t run into any immigrants that day. But he assured me that, before he picked me up, he had spotted someone he thought was undocumented, and tailed him around El Paso, recording him until Border Patrol officers arrived. “They made the apprehension,” he told me proudly in between sips of an energy drink.
Many people would empathize with those making this crossing, but Aguero does not. He often criticizes mainstream news outlets for portraying asylum seekers as vulnerable people, and was keen to convince me that the people crossing the border—“all males looking like Ninja Turtles”—were dangerous. Online, I had seen Aguero call immigrants “roaches.” Many of the young men he chased had the same accent as Aguero, the same color skin—their ancestors came from the same places. I got the feeling that by hunting them, he was distancing himself from them, and from his own foreignness.
A couple of months after my encounter with Aguero, during the 2022 midterms, I covered the election in Texas’s Fifteenth Congressional District—a long drive east from El Paso. The district, part of which sits along the southern border, is more than 80 percent Latino and has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold. I was expecting voters to rally around Michelle Vallejo, the 33-year-old Latina running as a progressive Democrat who campaigned around town in blue jeans, Tejano boots, and a star-spangled button-down. During her campaign, she stood beside her father, Daniel, acknowledging her humble Mexican roots.
But another Latina, the conservative Monica De La Cruz, had a narrative that voters found more appealing. “People are upset that while they waited their turn to immigrate to the United States, Democrats are actively ignoring laws on the books and allowing millions of migrants to come into our country illegally,” read one of her campaign emails to voters. Democrats, it went on, welcome them because “if they’re given enough handouts, these migrants will eventually be Democrat voters.” De La Cruz made history by flipping the district red.
That kind of rhetoric shares some elements with the“Great Replacement” theory—the idea of a coordinated effort to replace white people with immigrants and people of color. Eric Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center and an expert on authoritarianism, told me, “It’s used to justify this idea that we are not dealing with an immigration crisis, but we are in an existential war for the preservation of white America.”
De La Cruz’s victory surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. I’ve come across many other Latinos who, although not as militant as Aguero, are starting to harbor similar anti-immigrant feelings. When I was in El Paso, I spent an evening at the home of Dolores Chacon, a Mexican immigrant and Trump supporter who lives in a humble home overlooking the border wall. I had never seen a house so physically close to the border—just a few feet. Chacon had put up what she called a “freedom fence” to secure her property from immigrants. From her backyard, I could hear the rumbles of Ciudad Juárez and, every now and then, the screech of an American Border Patrol car engaged in a high-speed chase.
[From the March 2022 issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]
That night, Chacon and I hosted a roundtable discussion for Vice News on immigration in her home with about 10 other Latinos. They were teachers, entrepreneurs, and local politicians; old and young; light- and dark-skinned; naturalized citizens and American-born; lifelong Republicans and recent converts. Most of them were the descendants of immigrants.
“We have to call the things what they are … They are criminals because they are breaking the law,” Irene Armendariz Jackson, a grandmother who is now running for Congress, called out. “I’m talking about pedophiles. I’m talking about murderers. I’m talking about rapists.”
“Why doesn’t Nancy Pelosi let them all into her house?!” Jennifer Ivey, a farmer whose mother is from Mexico City, yelled.
“Now that we have that monkey virus. Now we’re gonna have to get another vaccine!” Chacon said, laughing, referring to Black Haitian immigrants at the border. (The World Health Organization has renamed monkeypox “mpox,” because the original virus name plays into “racist and stigmatizing language.”)
The most telling part of our conversation was when the group started talking about American culture and identity. Milcha Bermudez, who had the strongest Spanish accent in the room and had lived in Mexico for years, kept insisting that her point be heard.
“It’s very important that they assimilate,” she reiterated, wearing a red MAGA hat.
“When you say that immigrants should assimilate, what does it look like to ‘be an American’?” I asked the group.
“This is a free country. We have a certain way of living here,” Bermudez said.
Armendariz Jackson added that “people come into the country with their culture” and might not understand “there’s an American culture, and part of the American culture and traditions are our laws, our flag.”
Our laws, our flag. Research suggests that opposition to immigration may have less to do with economic anxieties about jobs and wages than it does with cultural identity. Jens Hainmueller, a professor at Stanford, and Daniel Hopkins, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed more than 100 studies about attitudes toward immigration from more than two dozen countries. The pair concluded that nativism is rooted in a fear that newcomers will distort national identity and corrode cultural norms. Natives, Hainmueller and Hopkins noted, don’t care that much about the race and ethnicity of immigrants as long as they learn the language.
The more Latinos migrate to the United States, the more they have struggled to prove themselves as “real Americans.” A 2021 study investigated how white people’s attitudes toward Mexican and Black Americans shifted from 1970 to 2010. In places that experienced higher levels of Mexican immigration, white people grew more hostile toward Mexicans and warmer toward Black people. The findings suggest that xenophobia against Latinos runs so deep, it can subdue even this nation’s most pernicious form of prejudice: anti-Blackness.
If assimilation is what Latinos seek—and, of course, many of them do—then their embrace of nativism should come as no surprise. The political scientist Benjamin R. Knoll began predicting in the early 2000s that this would happen. Knoll, who at the time was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, remembers a woman scoffing at the notion that Latinos could be nativists as he presented an early version of his dissertation, about immigration attitudes, at a political-science conference in Chicago. Knoll concluded that as Latinos continued to assimilate into American society, their pro-immigration bias would slowly dissipate, and “perhaps eventually disappear altogether.”
The quest to fit into American society is driving some Latinos toward extreme nativism; after all, nothing is more nationalistic than making immigrants, a sworn enemy of many white Americans, your enemy as well.
Toward the end of the day I spent driving around El Paso with Aguero, I broached a subject that had been on my mind for many hours. Aguero, who constantly referred to immigrants as “illegals,” has a criminal record himself.
In 2003 and again in 2004, he was arrested for possession of marijuana. (The charges were later dropped, but he was convicted for possession of drug paraphernalia.) In 2010, he was sentenced to two years of probation for assaulting a woman, having punched her in the face after she refused a kiss. He did not comply with the probation requirements, so he was sentenced to three days in jail in 2012. And in 2015, he pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony after getting in a car crash while driving intoxicated, seriously injuring a passenger in his car. I mentioned to him that I knew of these convictions, and asked: “Should I be more scared of migrants than, say, someone like you?”
“Well, I’m an American citizen. I’m not out here breaking into other countries,” he said. “These people are in America!”
Aguero spends as many as nine hours a day alone in his car, scanning the desert. He knows people think it’s weird, he said: They tell him so. “I travel with the music off a lot of the time.”
“And what do you think about?” I asked.
“Just everything,” he responded.
But I was sure it must get lonely out there, surveilling the border—hunting shadows of himself.
This essay has been adapted from Paola Ramos’s new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.
theatlantic.com