The Immigrants Who Oppose Immigration

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.

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.”

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 fronteroaccent. 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.

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