The two-year, “nationwide and international” campaign includes TV, radio, and digital spots–executing another ruthless, full-spectrum messaging push

19 FEB 2025

WASHINGTON, DC – The Trump administration has launched a $200 million taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign to spread fear, justify mass deportations, and continue shaping public opinion on immigration. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is overseeing a nationwide ad blitz telling immigrants: “we will hunt you down”—a chilling escalation in Trump’s relentless push to normalize the mass arrests and deportations already underway. This campaign is larger than Democrats’ entire immigration-related broadcast ad budget for the 2024 election, when they were already outspent 5 to 1 by Republicans, who poured $573 million into anti-immigrant advertising. According to a post-mortem study of 2024 battleground voters, the blitz of ads resulted in seven in ten voters recalling seeing an immigration ad before Election Day—nearly all of them were GOP attacks.

Yet despite the flood of right-wing disinformation, polling is clear: a majority of Americans support a pathway to citizenship over mass deportation. Democrats lost the messaging war in 2024 not because the public rejected humane immigration policies, but because they never heard a forceful case for them in the first place. The most powerful messages are those that are said out loud, repeatedly across multiple channels. 

Beatriz Lopez, Co-Executive Director of Catalyze/Citizens released the following statement:

“This is not a policy debate—it is psychological warfare that Democratic leaders should take very seriously. Far from ‘saving money’ for Americans, the Trump administration is wasting millions of dollars to paint themselves as heroes catching criminals as they continue to mark immigrants in our nation as national security threats. They mean to condition Americans into not only accepting mass deportation as necessary but cheering it on as spectacle. This isn’t about border security; it’s about seizing public sentiment and turning it into permission for a mass-scale assault on American communities.

“This is how authoritarianism takes hold—step by step, policy by policy, with just enough public support manufactured through fear. Trump has long understood that this is a messaging war, a race to define voters’ reality, which is why he is flooding TV, radio, social media, and AI with disinformation to frame immigrants as villains, scapegoats for crime and economic insecurity. He knows that if you repeat a lie long enough—and no one counters it—people will start to believe it. 

Democrats can not and should not remain silent or repeat diet-GOP talking points. That’s not a strategy; it’s complying. Democrats must understand that this is a messaging war—and that being effective messengers who can capitalize on their massive platforms is important when lives are on the line. Because if they don’t step up now, we won’t just lose elections, we will forfeit a healthy, functioning democracy.”

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