Did CNN Air a Staged Migrant Crossing of the Rio Grande?

Left-@CNN Right-Jaeson Jones pic.twitter.com/gcVvabAbDu

— Jenn Budd (@BuddJenn) March 19, 2021

The scene starts out serenely, as CNN national correspondent Ed Lavandera and crew motor by boat down the Rio Grande near the city of Hidalgo, Texas, as the sun sets. But soon, the idyllic setting gives way.

“That’s when we stumble across a group of migrants loading into a raft,” Lavandera says in the clip. He’s heard speaking with the migrants in Spanish to ease the tension. In the video, shot on March 11 and aired the next day, a group of migrants, including children, board a tiny raft and are led across by a man in a black ski mask and camouflage clothing. The migrants wear clean-looking surgical masks and life vests.

“The Rio Grande Valley has been ground zero for the latest surge in migration and here you see the operation unfolding right in front of us,” said Lavandera. “After the first raft crosses, the magnitude of this moment reveals itself. Dozens of migrants emerge and walk down to the river’s edge. You can see that this is a serious operation.”

He narrates what he describes as a “highly organized system,” with the raft taking at least six trips across the river. “Scenes like this are escalating in the Rio Grande Valley,” Lavandera says.

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But the scene may not be all that it appears to be. Immigrant rights advocates and others claim that the footage was staged, potentially with the cooperation of the Border Patrol. CNN was warned that the clip appeared to be a fabrication before it aired, but the network decided to run it anyway. A similar clip that appears to show the same or a similar trafficking incident from another angle was shared across right-wing media and even linked to on the social media accounts of members of Congress. This clip went viral among immigration opponents, and is helping to fuel the story of an out-of-control border. The video—legitimized on mainstream media—easily fit into that narrative. Now a series of charges and counter-charges have demonstrated the radioactive politics of immigration.

The scene appears to be just a preview of what’s to come. Yesterday’s Sunday shows centered on the border, fueling a crisis narrative as the administration continued to double down on its “border is closed” messaging.

In the CNN footage, the smuggler leading the boat wears fatigues and a black ski mask. Smugglers typically attempt to blend in with the migrants, to avoid more severe punishment should they be caught. Smugglers also don’t normally provide face masks and life vests, nor ferry six boatloads of people across in broad daylight. Migrants also don’t typically line up single file along the shore to cross.

To Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent, the smuggler’s face mask rang alarm bells. “That told me [the smuggler] knew he would be filmed and he didn’t want to be set up,” she said.

Marianna Treviño Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, pointed out that her organization goes out on the river at least four times a week and never sees any kind of trafficking operation like this.

The Guardian reported that the area of the river where the footage was taken can only be accessed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection–controlled boat slips. Wright confirmed this to the Prospect.

Wright added that a video like this is normally only distributed in right-wing media, not mainstream outlets like CNN. “They got smarter this time,” she said. “They either duped Ed Lavandera into doing this or he’s so desperate for ratings he went along with it.”

Separately, another video appears to show the same or a similar scene. Filmed by Jaeson Jones of Tripwires & Triggers, a right-wing media site that covers the border, the footage has been viewed thousands of times on social media, and has been covered by the Daily Mail, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, and others. Taken from the north shore of the river, the vertical phone footage shows migrants arriving through the trees on the American side of the river. The boat in this video and the boat in the CNN footage have the same markings, and the same ski-masked, fatigues-wearing man who appears to be steering the boat. It’s unclear if the two videos were taken at the same time on March 11, but it’s also unclear how long CNN was on the river to get the shot. It likely took hours to ferry the dozens of migrants across the river. As the migrants disembark, the men behind the camera are greeting them cordially in Spanish and laughing.

Left-@CNN Right-Jaeson Jones pic.twitter.com/gcVvabAbDu

— Jenn Budd (@BuddJenn) March 19, 2021

“If you’re crossing people and cross ten people, you’re begging to be caught by Border Patrol,” said Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, a volunteer who works with asylum seekers along the border. “No one is stupid enough to go back and forth. In the video, they said that they did that six times. I can’t imagine any coyote willing to risk their freedom like that. From my experience, I’ve never heard of anything like that or seen anything like that.”

At one point in the footage from the shore, the men behind the camera have a conversation. One person says to the other, “Do you ever hook those guys up?” and another person responds, “Yeah. Two or three of ’em. They’re always Grade A.” In her Medium post, Budd wrote, “As a former agent, what I hear is these men possibly talking about paying this smuggler off to gather a bunch of unsuspecting migrants and have them cross in a particular place in order to get this shot.”

Later in the conversation, one of the men says, “Oh yeah, they’re twenty-sixes,” referring to a section of the U.S. Code on re-entry of people who entered illegally. In this case, it likely means that the group includes migrants who were expelled or deported and are trying again, a growing phenomenon under the Title 42 health order which expels migrants and asylum seekers.

A third video, taken from the same boat CNN filmed from and showing the same trafficking incident, was shared by Texas GOP chair Allen West on March 12. “So we are just watching this happen? This is utterly disturbing. We had better border security in freaking Afghanistan!” West wrote. The video has more than 90,000 views.

The National Butterfly Center, a conservation organization that became involved in migration issues when the Trump administration attempted to build the border wall across its reservation, posted on Facebook and Twitter about the videos. Wright told the Prospect that she alerted CNN to the possibility that the trafficking incident may have been staged prior to the footage being aired live. “Then, we saw CNN air the same staged event, shot from the river—not the riverbank—with claims that Ed Lavandera just ‘stumbled upon’ it ‘within 10 minutes,’” the group posted on Facebook.

The Butterfly Center alleged that Tim Wilkins, “a failed, local GOP candidate running on an anti-immigration platform … arranged for CNN to be there at the appointed time and place.”

CNN has not yet responded to a request for comment. But in tweets, its head of communications Matt Dornic maintains that the two videos were not shot on the same day. In another tweet, Dornic wrote, “CNN did not participate in any type of coordinated effort to shoot a staged scene of migrants crossing the river nor have we found any credible evidence that suggests our team was unknowingly part of a set-up by Border Patrol or anyone else.”

Budd says that the Tripwires & Triggers footage often gets picked up by larger media outlets. In a March 18 Medium post titled “How Border Patrol Manipulates Media,” Budd wrote, “Republicans [are] making photo ops by visiting the border and espousing lies and by right-wing white nationalists setting up fake scenarios of smuggling for the press to capture.”

Jones’s footage from the shore was also shared by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX) on Twitter. Neither congressman has yet responded to a request for comment. “We have to understand and address the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that lead migrants to the U.S.,” Cuellar wrote in the tweet. Cuellar also showed the video at a local roundtable event, and would not respond to local reporters’ questions about the origins of the video.

Budd says that the reason right-wing outlets are pushing footage like this is to “sabotage” the Biden administration. She says that except for the rise in the number of unaccompanied children, there is no border crisis. More than 13,000 unaccompanied children are currently in government custody, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a March 16 statement that the department is on track to stop more migrants crossing the border than at any time in the last 20 years.

But the Biden administration has repeatedly said—in English and in Spanish—that the border is still closed. With few exceptions, this is true. The administration has left in place a Trump-era health authority which allows the government to deport all migrants and asylum seekers at the border, with the exception of children. The health order may be contributing to the rise in unaccompanied children, if parents are electing to send their children across without them. The rising numbers of apprehensions may also reflect higher-than-usual rates of recidivism; multiple apprehensions of the same migrant would be counted multiple times.

The allegedly staged videos come as Republicans are frantically raising alarms about the border. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently took a trip to the border to tour a migrant detention center, calling the situation “human heartbreak.” Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn recently announced another delegation to travel to the border, pressuring Biden to crack down. At a press conference on March 9, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “The Biden Administration has created a crisis at our southern border through open border policies that give the green light to dangerous cartels and other criminal activity.”

Alongside the governor was Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the border patrol agents’ union. The union endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, and has featured the former president on its weekly podcast, The Green Line, which is sponsored by Breitbart. Andrew Feinberg of The Independent reported yesterday that there appears to be coordination between agents who are unhappy with Biden changes and Republicans eager to hype chaos at the border and make it harder for Biden to govern. Budd also alleges that Border Patrol officers help right-wing, anti-immigrant groups gain access to the border.

The union and Border Patrol have not yet responded to a request for comment. In the week after the trafficking incident, the Biden administration has implemented an informal “gag order,” restricting what agents can say to the media and requiring all inquiries to go through Washington.

The National Butterfly Center posted on its Facebook page that when a local reporter shared the Jones footage from the shore with them, they recognized it as a “psy[chological] op by U.S. Border Patrol” designed to mislead or misinform the public about the border.

“I mean this is exactly the kind of stuff they are taught at West Point and the Homeland Security and Defense college for psychological operations that are deliberately intended to sway public opinion, influence public policy, win or lose elections,” explained Wright. “I do not believe this could have been done without Border Patrol approval,” Budd added in her Medium post. She told the Prospect, “If it’s true that it was staged, that’s a pretty big crime. They just filmed themselves aiding and abetting smuggling.”

It’s also unclear why Border Patrol appears to have never apprehended the migrants who crossed in the two videos, nor made any public announcements since the videos aired that they had apprehended these migrants. Budd explained that foot traffic and vehicle traffic on the north shore of the river would have triggered censors monitored by CBP. Budd also said that agents are most heavily deployed near ports of entry, and this footage was taken within a mile of a port of entry. If it wasn’t staged, there have been no announcements of any investigations into why Border Patrol failed to stop this major crossing or apprehend the migrants. “Either it’s a setup or it’s an ungodly amount of just incompetence on the part of the Border Patrol,” Budd said.

In a Facebook post responding to the Butterfly Center’s allegations, Wilkins said that he spoke to the Border Patrol union representative who handles media and said that he only wanted to raise media awareness of the situation at the border. To Budd, this makes it seem like “the [Border Patrol] chief is running a separate media campaign through the union to separate himself from these dirty tactics,” she wrote in a text to the Prospect.

Even if the two videos were taken at different times, it’s clear that CNN did work with Tim Wilkins, the local Republican candidate in McAllen, Texas, to take the boat out. Facebook screenshots indicate that Wilkins planned the outing for CNN on March 10, the day before the first footage of the trafficking incident appeared. Following the outing, Wilkins and the others in the boat posted photos of the trafficking incident and a video in which Lavandera can be heard narrating his CNN clip. Since the controversy began, Wilkins has threatened the Butterfly Center and its director with legal action, according to screenshots of his lawyer’s letter posted on Facebook.

Wilkins has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Budd maintains that CNN may not have known Wilkins and his associates’ affiliations, and Wilkins maintains that he doesn’t know Jones, who filmed from the riverbank. If that’s true, CNN really may not have known that the scene may have been staged. “If CNN got duped that’s bad, and then on top of it, they’re made to look fake by the very people who say that they are fake,” Budd added. “It’s diabolical.”