On February 12, Fox News’ Steve Doocy tapped into a long-running strain of nativism when he suggested that migrants were responsible for bringing diseases into the United States.

“Is there a connection between the number of migrants who are coming into the country, not being health screened, and the takeoff of some of these things like plague?” the Fox & Friends co-host asked.

His comment was an extension of former President Donald Trump’s recent Nazi-esque allegation that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and “coming in with disease, ” a comment he’d made back in 2022 as well. False insinuations that migrants are a threat to public health have a long history in right-wing media, where those types of racist claims have served as a destructive trope of border and immigration coverage.

Right-wing media have spent at least the last two decades framing immigrants as carriers of disease. Sometimes these racist attacks arise out of an existing public health emergency — the Ebola outbreak in 2014 or the COVID-19 pandemic. Other times they emerge from an acute and manufactured panic about migration levels, with conservatives blaming people crossing the border for spreading tuberculosis, measles, smallpox, or other illnesses.

There is little evidence that migration is a significant driver of disease, and mountains of research to the contrary. But that trope has persisted in U.S. immigration debates, dating back at least to an 1891 immigration law that prohibited entry of “persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease.” The new restrictions were widely understood to apply to so-called new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe — a blueprint for racialized exclusion that nativists would regularly return to for more than a century.

To take just one example, as the Spanish flu spread throughout the country in 1918, the Ku Klux Klan blamed the pandemic on recent Italian immigrants. By the end of the 1920s, “the rhetoric of the biological hierarchy of races trumped all other medicalized rationales for shutting the doors to the foreign born,” Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern wrote in their landmark study, The Foreignness of Germs. Markel and Stern also chronicled how the rise of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s was used as a justification to refuse entry to immigrants, especially Haitians.

The long history of rhetoric linking migrants with disease is inseparable from the use of U.S. immigration policy to maintain structures of white supremacy. And the connection is almost embarrassingly evident in contemporary right-wing media discourse.

New millennium, same xenophobia

At the turn of the millennium, a network of nativist organizations funded by John Tanton — the father of the modern anti-immigrant movement — were busy laying a blueprint that conservative media have followed ever since.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that a Tanton-funded publication called The Social Contract published an article in 2003 titled “Immigration and Public Health.” “Mass immigration has contributed to a new threat to our nation’s health. Diseases once practically eradicated are breaking out again,” the piece argued. “Tropical diseases, previously unheard of in the United States, but prevalent in Third World countries, are appearing.”

When swine flu emerged in Mexico in 2009, the Tanton network was ready to weaponize it. Longtime Tanton-network restrictionist Frosty Wooldridge wrote an article arguing, “The recent outbreak of Swine flu in Mexico and over 40 cases in the United States exposes yet another aspect of mass immigration into the United States” — specifically, that “diseases stem from cultures that lack personal hygiene, personal health habits and standards for disease prevention.”

The broader right-wing media ecosystem followed the same playbook. Talk radio personality Michael Savage told his listeners “about the horrible, horrible story of illegal aliens bringing a deadly new flu strain into the United States of America.” Glenn Beck, then a Fox News and radio show host, warned that people from Mexico would try to “flood this border.” Conservative commentator Larry Kudlow, then at CNBC, referred to it as “the Mexican flu.” (Kudlow would later serve as director of Trump’s National Economic Council before joining Fox Business.)

Tanton-network organizations also used the Ebola outbreak in 2014 to advance their xenophobic messages, as detailed by the SPLC. Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Tanton-funded Center for Immigration Studies, appeared on Fox News to argue that there were a “significant number of people from these Ebola infected countries illegally crossing and being caught by Border Patrol.”

White nationalist website VDare referenced the racist novel The Camp of the Saints — a favorite of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, then working for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — in an article that argued: “If we haven’t already gotten the message that mass immigration is destroying the country, perhaps a disease that makes people bleed from every orifice will convey the message.”

Other right-wing outlets used the outbreak, which was centered in West Africa, to attack then-President Barack Obama. Rush Limbaugh derided Obama for following public health experts and refusing to shut down entry to the United States. Savage said Obama wanted to “bring infected children” to the country. (All told, by June 2015 only four patients had been diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.)

The same year, conservatives also baselessly argued that migrant children were bringing tuberculosis to the U.S. Fox News’ website ran an opinion piece in June 2014 suggesting “that tuberculosis has become a dangerous issue at both the border and the camps,” according to “at least a half dozen anonymous sources” who “allege that the government is covering up what they believe to be a very serious health threat.” The article also cited claims by network contributor Marc Siegel about the prevalence of drug-resistant TB in Central America. Later that month, Siegel alleged that immigrants were driving a “public health crisis” on Fox & Friends — comments that were then picked up by conservative sites Newsmax and The Daily Caller. Fox’s Laura Ingraham, then a conservative radio host, also blamed migrants for a nonexistent tuberculosis crisis, saying, “The government spreads the illegal immigrants across the country, and the disease is spread across the country.”

Conservative pundits also argued in 2014 that migrants were putting Border Patrol agents at risk. Still riding high as a conservative agenda-setter, Matt Drudge ran a banner headline: “BORDER PATROL AGENTS TEST POSITIVE FOR DISEASE CARRIED BY IMMIGRANTS.” Conservative radio show host Brian Fischer posted: “Four out of 5 border agents contracting infectious diseases from illegals.”

By 2015, Donald Trump, at that point a candidate for president, had famously defined himself as the most high-profile anti-immigrant political figure in decades. A month after announcing his candidacy by claiming undocumented people were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” Trump said people from Mexico were responsible for “tremendous infectious disease … pouring across the border."

In 2016, with the general election in full swing, Fox’s Heather Nauert fearmongered about “an illegal health risk,” accusing “thousands of immigrant children” of bringing “disease” with them when they had arrived two years prior fleeing violence in their home countries. (Nauert would later serve as a spokesperson for Trump’s State Department.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined the claim was baseless, like virtually all of its predecessors. But with Trump’s victory and a new global pandemic on the horizon, right-wing media were poised to lean into these types of xenophobic myths more than ever.

Trump and COVID supercharge accusations of migrants carrying disease

The Trump administration saw a mainstreaming of anti-immigrant rhetoric, including using public health as a pretext for imposing harsh new rules and penalties on unauthorized border crossing and undocumented immigrants.

Leading up to the 2018 midterms, Fox News repeatedly accused migrants of spreading diseases. Ingraham, now at Fox News, said that she didn’t “have a lot of faith in the health screenings when you got 4,000 people coming to a border check at one period of time.”

“So, we got HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, TB, shigellosis, syphilis, I know that chagas is another problem, and that’s insect-borne,” Ingraham said, adding, “This is not about your views on immigration. This is purely health."

The same month, she claimed immigration is “a health issue too, because we don't know what people have coming in here. We have diseases in this country we haven't had for decades.”

Ingraham’s colleague Brian Kilmeade, one of the duller knives in the Fox News cutlery set, weighed in days later during a segment hyping a so-called migrant caravan.

“What about diseases?” asked Kilmeade. “I mean, there is a reason why you can't bring a kid to school unless he is inoculated. You know?”

The story was the same in 2019, with Fox News accusing migrants of carrying smallpox and measles.

“You've got to wonder from a health perspective how soon it's going to be until we hear about a catastrophe,” Kilmeade said over footage of migrants, adding, “They’re not inoculated like we are.”

Ingraham claimed that “most of those people could be bringing a variety of diseases into the country.” Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel, who previously pushed the tuberculosis panic in 2014, told viewers that the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare had left physicians “swamped,” and that undocumented migrants were further sucking up scarce medical resources.

Then came COVID-19. From the beginning, reporting on the virus was racialized in right-wing media, initially with a heavy focus on its origins in China. For some, the pandemic was proof that China was developing bioweapons that it couldn’t properly contain. For others, it was used to perpetuate stereotypes about Chinese food markets. What remained consistent was that COVID-19 — for the conservatives who acknowledged it as a public health risk at all — was foreign.

It didn’t take long for this anti-China rhetoric to transform into a broader attack on immigrants. In late March 2020, Customs and Border Protection requested that the military provide support at the border because of migrants’ “potential to spread infectious disease.” This increased militarization of the border was contrary to public health best practices, but furthered a goal of Trump and his right-wing media supporters.

That was just the beginning. As Trump’s draconian approach to the border, which consisted primarily of detention and deportation of migrants, worsened the spread of the virus, right-wing figures continued to blame the very people the president was targeting.

Two months into the pandemic, Fox News contributor Tom Homan — the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who was one of the architects of Trump’s family separation policy — accused migrants of spreading COVID-19 and other communicable diseases.

“Look, this COVID is nothing new — even though it’s a terrible disease, it’s a new disease, it’s not new that disease comes across that border every day,” said Homan. “When I was ICE director, we had facilities that were cohorted and shut down over measles, which this country defeated decades ago."

Fox News continued to push the same line into President Joe Biden’s first year in office. A Media Matters study found that in March 2021 alone, Fox ran 65 segments fearmongering about migrants bringing COVID-19 to the United States. (The real source of the viral spread wasn’t immigration, it was the right-wing opposition to public health measures like mask mandates and vaccination efforts.)

Still, in an interview that month with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo claimed migrants are “flooding across the U.S. border with as much as 10 times the COVID-19 rate as Americans,” citing The Washington Times.

Just days earlier, Fox’s Jeanine Pirro made the same argument: “They've got COVID. They've got all kinds of diseases. They are being released into the United States.”

The following month, Trump adviser and white nationalist Stephen Miller called the U.S. southern border “the single greatest epidemiological disaster in this country.”

That trend continued throughout the summer, as Fox News and competitor networks Newsmax and One America News ramped up their accusations that migrants were spreading the new Delta variant of COVID-19. The narrative spread to CBS This Morning, which adopted nearly identical nativist framing. By that fall, Fox News was seemingly covering the pandemic only when it could be used as an excuse to demonize migrants. In November 2021, Ingraham said Biden was “encouraging the spread of COVID” through his immigration policies.

Even as Fox News mostly moved on from COVID-19 in 2022, its contributors returned to more generalized xenophobic claims about immigrants and public health. In April of that year, Fox contributor Tammy Bruce claimed migrants were risks of carrying “Zika or measles or tuberculosis or scabies.” When the network did discuss the pandemic, it was largely to defend Title 42, the Trump-era policy of forced deportation of migrants under the guise of public health.

As Trump consolidated his domination of the Republican Party throughout 2023 and into 2024, right-wing media and MAGA allies continued to target migrants — his signature issue — by fearmongering about the dangers of disease.

In April 2023, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said on her podcast that migrants are “people bringing in diseases.” That July, Fox again framed migrant children as vectors for tuberculosis, mischaracterizing latent TB bacteria as a major threat requiring unaccompanied minors to be confined in border facilities (latent tuberculosis can’t spread unless it becomes an active infection).

In August, Fox’s Doocy cited Siegel, Fox’s medical contributor, to lament the “migrant inflow into Texas, and all across the country, and the amount of disease we thought had been eradicated in the United States — now suddenly we’re seeing these things pop up, different varieties of significant diseases in suburban areas all around America."

The next month, Fox anchor Harris Faulkner stoked fears of newly arrived children infecting their classmates with illnesses, a dynamic she referred to as “immunization troubles."

On February 7, Siegel was back to his old tricks. In an appearance on Fox’s Outnumbered, he called the border situation a “medical emergency” and argued, “There’s all kinds of public health problems leaking across the border right now."

Given this context, Trump’s recent accusation that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and that “people are coming in with disease” doesn’t look like an outlier, but rather an escalation of long-running conservative bigotries.

Now, with Trump as the de facto Republican nominee, the former president and his advisers have promised to wage an unprecedented war against undocumented people in the United States, pledging to use the military and law enforcement to deport as many as 10 million people. Conservative pundits have already begun setting the stage for that initiative, as well as whatever cruel and inhumane policies a second Trump administration would adopt at the border.

If history is any guide, those plans will almost certainly rely on demonizing migrants by accusing them of carrying disease — and Doocy's recent comments on Fox & Friends suggest that right-wing media are already dialing up that loathsome brand of xenophobic rhetoric for 2024 and beyond.