Consider This from NPR - The migrant aid group caught in a right-wing social media thread

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

A conservative group posted a social media thread showing flyers in a border encampment in Mexico urging migrants to vote for Joe Biden. Now, the woman caught up in it, speaks to NPR. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Throughout Donald Trump's political career, there are two themes he's come back to again and again. The first is immigration. Here he is in 2016. We're going to have strong, incredible borders. And people are going to come into our country, but they're going to come into our country legally. They're going to come in legally. The second is false claims of voter fraud. Even though Trump won the election in 2016, he lost the popular vote. He tried to blame that loss on fraud.

And of course, he continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Here's Trump speaking at a rally on January 6th, 2021, shortly before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. In that speech, Trump united those two themes. In the state of Arizona, over 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by non-citizens. 2,000 ballots...

There's no evidence that's true. The 2020 election was one of the most litigated and closely scrutinized elections in U.S. history. Even an audit of Arizona's election that was run by Trump's allies failed to uncover evidence of fraud. But now, as Trump and President Biden face off for the presidency once more, Trump is back at it. And so are his allies. Here's one of Trump's closest advisors, Stephen Miller, speaking at a press conference last week. When you have no border, when you have millions of unvetted foreigners from over 150 countries pouring into this nation, with no way, no legal ability, let alone a legal requirement to verify that they are citizens,

you are inviting grand foreign interference in our elections on an unprecedented scale for the sole purpose of helping Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Earlier this month, House Republicans introduced a bill aimed at stopping non-citizens from voting in federal elections, even though that's already illegal and there's no evidence it's happening in significant numbers. Nevertheless, conspiracy theories about plots to get non-citizens to vote are taking hold.

Consider this. The political rhetoric from Trump and his allies about immigrants stealing elections has real-life consequences for people working with migrants. I was getting death threats. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR. April 15th started off as a typical day for Gabriela Zavala. She was juggling the demands of her busy family life in Texas with running Resource Center Matamoros,

a small NGO that helps asylum seekers in Mexico on the other side of the border from Brownsville. But by evening, her world had been turned upside down. NPR's Jude Jaffe-Block takes the story from here. Zavala soon learned she and her NGO, RCM, featured prominently in a social media thread posted by an arm of the Conservative Heritage Foundation called the Oversight Project. It showed Spanish-language flyers with RCM's logo and that of President Biden's campaign. A video in the thread showed the flyers hanging in porta-potties at a migrant encampment in Matamoros. The flyers said in

grammatically incorrect Spanish, reminder to vote for President Biden when you're in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open. And they were signed with her name. I was almost in a state of shock. I said, wow, you know, this is completely untrue. Zavala says she didn't write the flyer telling migrants to vote illegally, nor did she have any connection with it. I was like, why would somebody want to do this? You know, why would somebody want to intentionally create a fake flyer? The flyer was riddled with Spanish language errors. It included an outdated description of RCM from its website that hasn't been updated in years. That part of the flyer's text appears to have been run through Google Translate.

The flyer also lists a very old phone number, which also appears on the outdated website. Zavala says she does not support the flyers message. I would never sit there and tell somebody that can't vote, that I know can't vote, hey, go vote. The thread about the flyers spread quickly and racked up more than 9 million views on the social media platform X. The executive director of the Oversight Project, Mike Howell, says the thread did not accuse Zavala of authoring the flyer. He also told the New York Times he condemns death threats. The flyer is very real. It's telling illegal aliens to vote for Joe Biden. The morning after Heritage posted the thread, multiple Republican members of Congress

asked Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas about the flyer. They were grilling him about the record high number of people who have come to the U.S.-Mexico border. The Flyer has also buttressed a false narrative that undocumented immigrants are swaying American elections. It's already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and studies have repeatedly shown it is very rare. Former President Donald Trump and his allies insist this campaign season that it is an issue. For example, here is House Speaker Mike Johnson last week. We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it's not been something that is easily provable. We don't have that number. To date, it is still unknown who created the flyers that bears Zavala's name

and who posted them in the porta-potties. The social media thread credited Muckraker, a right-wing website, with discovering it. Muckraker is headed by Anthony Rubin, who often uses undercover tactics in his videos. Rubin told NPR that the video of the Flyers was shot by an anonymous source with a close connection to his team. Rubin has traveled across Latin America to film migrants in transit to the U.S., which he portrays as an invasion. In his videos, he often asks migrants about the upcoming election. Migrantes prefieren Presidente Biden o Presidente Trump?

Biden. Biden. On April 15th, in the hours before the thread about the flyers appeared online, Rubin and his brother rang the bell at Resource Center Matamoros, saying they wanted to volunteer. Rubin confirmed that in an interview with NPR. You know, I rode the train of death, been smuggled into Mexico by the Sinaloa cartel. I got kidnapped by the Gulf cartel. The point is, I know the ins and outs of this thing. I've studied these NGOs that hand out all the maps. So yeah, of course, we were inquiring whether or not it would be

possible to volunteer. Zavala's not it would be possible to volunteer. Zavala's staff believed Rubin wanted to volunteer. They called Zavala, who spoke with him by phone. In all honesty, we're just trying to help as many people as possible before Trump gets reelected. So, ha! They need me. What are they going to do? That clip from their phone call wound up as part of the thread about the flyers, with a caption saying Zavala had implied that she, quote, wants to help as many illegals as possible before President

Trump is re-elected. RCM's director, Hugo Terrones, who spoke to Rubin directly, told NPR that Rubin asked him strange questions. I didn't even know what he was talking about. And he asked me, Biden or Trump? Rubin told NPR that he did not recall what he asked Terrones. Zavala said it bothers her that no one who was publicizing the flyer on social media or in Congress had verified the flyer with her first. They never cared to call me and find out whether it was true or not. Mike Howell of the Oversight Project acknowledged to NPR that he did not reach out to Zavala before posting the thread. It was in the immediate public interest to know about the invasion in the United States. The Daily Signal, which the Heritage Foundation calls its news outlet,

noted in its second story about the flyers, published a day after the thread posted, that it had requested comment and Zavala had not responded. NPR asked Anthony Rubin whether it had occurred to him to ask RCM staff when he visited, before the thread was published, whether the organization had any relationship to the flyer. It certainly occurred to me. Yeah, it sounded as if that thought did not pass through my head. He told NPR he didn't ask because he'd been previously kidnapped by the Gulf cartel nearby and had been told to never return. And I would think that saying, showing up there and saying, hey, check out this flyer, you know, was that, I mean, that might, you know, bring unnecessary attention,

shall we say, upon myself and my brother in enemy territory. The thread calls the camp where the flyers were filmed in the Porta Potties an RCM location. But multiple sources, both inside and outside of RCM, told NPR that is not correct. These days, the camp is only a small, informal encampment. Andrea Rudnick, with the migrant aid group Team Brownsville, says she didn't see the flyers at the encampment or hear from any volunteers or migrants who did. She says it's interesting that the video online shows the flyers in the porta-potties. Those porta-potties are pretty filthy.

If we wanted people to know something, it would be put in a different place. When NPR visited what is left of the migrant encampment in Matamoros, few people were present. One was Orlando Martinez, a 36-year-old from El Salvador who's been there for over a year. He says in the time he's been at the site, he hasn't heard people talking about politics. He says migrants know they can't vote in the U.S. And he says he hadn't noticed any such flyers. Nor has he seen anyone come to tell people at the camp to vote for Biden. After the threat about the flyers went viral,

the Associated Press put out a story that quoted Zavala saying she didn't write the flyers or encourage migrants to vote. Fact-checking outlets and The New York Times did stories, too. But the Heritage Foundation has stood by its story. Howell told NPR none of that has discredited the thread. Our international bombshell reporting has stood the test of all scrutiny and will withstand some more. As for Zavala, she's still grappling with what it means for her name to be associated with these flyers. When she read the AP's story, she noticed it mentioned

a social media post calling for her neck to be snapped. After I read that, I just cried, you know, and it still makes me want to cry because, like, I'm a person, you know, and then it made me really worry about my security, you know, my kids. Anyway. She says it weighs on her that acts of violence, like the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, have been inspired by immigration-themed conspiracy theories. But she adds, it doesn't change her goals for helping asylum seekers. That was NPR's Jude Jaffe Block. This episode was produced by Audrey Nguyen and Brianna Scott. Additional reporting from Mexico was contributed by Texas

Public Radio's Gage Davila and independent journalist Veronica Gabriela Cardenas. It was edited by Brett Neely and Courtney Dning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.