On the May 28 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, “straight news” correspondent Griff Jenkins -- filling in as co-host -- claimed that “the Border Patrol says behind closed doors … once we just release [migrant or asylum-seeking] adult single males into the community, it is going to fundamentally change the sovereignty of our country on that border.” Jenkins also said that he “wish[es] they would say it publicly more often.” 

Later in the day, another Fox News personality made a similar point. Outnumbered co-host Harris Faulkner, who also anchors the companion “news” show Outnumbered Overtime, discussed the possibility of Transportation Security Administration agents joining Border Patrol on the border “to keep that line, that sovereignty down there,” again suggesting that immigration is a threat to U.S. sovereignty.

On the May 23 edition of Outnumbered Overtime, Fox News contributor and former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan similarly claimed that “if we fail to detain [adult individual asylum-seekers] until they see a judge, you will lose the border … [and] you’re going to see an unprecedented surge of all sorts of chaos on the border.” Faulkner commented that Homan’s comment “gives me chills.”  

Fox News has consistently driven the nativist narrative that immigration “is a flat-out invasion” of the United States. Fox & Friends has played a key role in driving the misinformation. Co-host Steve Doocy recently praised Jenkins for a report fearmongering about “rumors of ebola” in a migrant caravan; Jenkins had reported on the rumors but had debunked them in the same report. 

As The Washington Post reported, the “militaristic ‘invasion’ metaphor” is “one of the oldest and most persistent anti-immigration metaphors in the country’s history, employed to oppose Irish Catholics, Asians, Latinos, Germans, Jews and just about everyone except white Protestants of English ancestry who now lives in America.” Framing immigration as an “invasion” erases the individual stories and reasons people have for seeking to live in the United States, replacing it with an imaginary, monolithic “army” seeking to destroy the country.