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On Wednesday, New York police disputed some details in a disturbing segment that aired the night before on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program that was filled with xenophobia.
NBC News reports:
New York City’s Guardian Angels tackled to the ground a man they claimed was a migrant who was caught shoplifting during a live TV interview, but they later said they have no proof of the claims ... The encounter happened Tuesday as Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa was doing a live television interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity about migrant crime in New York City.
“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys right here on the corner of 42nd and 7th,” Sliwa said on air, “They’ve taken over!” As Hannity’s team filmed the attack, Sliwa kept mouthing off. “He had been shoplifting first, the Guardian Angels spotted him, stopped him, he resisted, and let’s just say we gave him a little pain compliance,” Sliwa told Hannity. “His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations.” Despite having no real evidence the man was a migrant, Sliwa went on to say, "These illegals think they own this street. They think they rule the night. This is our country.”
Sliwa has a history of fabricating crimes for political gain. And this ordeal, conveniently captured by Hannity’s film crew, happened to occur during a segment intended to stoke worries about migrant arrivals in New York City.
The next day, the NYPD told CNN the man was actually a 23-year-old from the Bronx who’d come to the U.S. as a 10-year-old. And while the police didn't address the allegations of shoplifting, police did say they had given him a summons for disorderly conduct after he “repeatedly attempted to interfere with and disrupt a live interview.” A statement the NYPD gave to Fox News claimed the man was acting in a "loud, disorderly threatening manner." Sliwa later told The Associated Press he thought the man was a migrant because the man spoke Spanish. To NBC News, Sliwa said that the shoplifting was something "people in the crowd said" and claimed "the man had a backpack that contained 'baby clothes with tags on them.'”
However, Sliwa's claims during the broadcast was mostly just rumors and innuendo — and Fox News viewers were left with an entirely different impression. It’s disturbing to consider that Fox News' anti-immigrant sentiment is being regularly broadcast into restaurants, airports, waiting rooms and military bases across the country.
But Hannity's segment is far from the only example of conservatives cheering on anti-immigrant vigilantes these days. In fact, the broader conservative movement has largely come to sympathize with — if not to outright celebrate — people who threaten or carry out violence against migrants.
We see evidence of this in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s seeming disappointment that Texas is “not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” Abbott's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, has publicly pondered officials "putting hands on" migrants, even though immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. Violent, anti-immigration intimidation has manifested in right-wing militias and vigilantes congregating along the southern border. And conservatives continue to rally in support of people like George Alan Kelly, the Arizona rancher who’s been charged with murdering a migrant who crossed his property (Kelly has pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in March).
Hannity’s segment with Sliwa, though, does seem to mark an escalation of Fox News' anti-immigrant propaganda, airing what appears to have been essentially a bigoted attack live on television. But this escalation coincides with a pattern across the conservative movement: a growing thirst for anti-immigrant violence, paired with an increasingly desperate need to justify it.