AT DAWN ON THE morning of January 31, 2015, five months before Donald Trump would announce his candidacy for president, Julie Golvach was in bed in her Houston, Texas, home when she was awoken by a knock at her front door. She opened it to find two police officers standing on her stoop, there to inform her that her twenty-five-year-old son, Spencer, had been fatally shot in the wee hours of that morning.
Spencer, who had his own guitar shop and a job as a forklift operator at a local warehouse, had been in his white Toyota pickup when it happened. He had just dropped off his girlfriend—it was her birthday—and was waiting at a red light to turn left and head home to his apartment when he was fatally shot in the head. In the days that followed, Golvach learned about the man who had murdered her son. He was a Mexican man by the name of Victor Reyes with a long rap sheet including burglary, assault, and multiple illegal entries into the United States, who had been in and out of federal prison and had been deported four times. Each time, Reyes would simply walk across the border again. The bullet that took Spencer’s life was part of a shooting spree that had begun earlier that night when Reyes shot another man in the face. After Spencer, he killed another two people and wounded three, before dying himself in a shootout with police.
The pain of losing her son was unimaginable. But for Golvach, the tragedy was all the more bitter because it should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. Reyes should not have been in the United States to begin with, she thought. Her son had not only been a victim of a convicted felon’s bullet; he had also been a victim of a badly broken immigration system that allowed people like the man who murdered him to sneak into the country and wreak havoc in communities like hers. Everybody knew it was a problem, she thought, and nobody did a thing about it.
So Golvach was thrilled in June of 2015 as she watched TV news coverage of Trump’s campaign announcement, listening to him talk about criminals who come to the United States from Mexico. “When I heard what he said, I said ‘It finally looks like somebody gets it, and cares about us,’ ” Golvach said.
A short time later, Golvach was contacted by Maria Espinoza, a conservative activist who ran an organization called the Remembrance Project, which describes itself as “a voice for victims killed by illegal aliens,” often called “Angel Families.” The group receives substantial funding from U.S. Inc., another group, founded by John Tanton, that pushes for tougher immigration enforcement and less immigration into the United States overall. Espinoza told Golvach that she had been reaching out to each of the presidential campaigns asking what they planned to do for families like hers. Few responded—until Trump. His campaign wanted to meet Angel Families and invite them to his arena-style campaign rallies.
Trump instantly understood the power of the Angel Families. Weeks after he announced his candidacy, thirty-two-year-old Kate Steinle had been shot and killed by Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant, while walking along San Francisco’s Embarcadero. The case generated national headlines and became a frequent topic of discussion on Fox News. One day as he watched Fox & Friends, the morning program he rarely missed, Trump saw an interview on the subject with a man named Jamiel Shaw, whose seventeen-year-old son, with whom he shared a name, had been killed by an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles in 2008. Trump was so taken with Shaw’s story that he called the Fox control room to ask to be put in touch with him.
By November, Trump had announced plans to hold a rally in Beaumont, Texas, about an hour and a half east of Houston, and Golvach was told that he wanted to meet between eight and ten Angel Moms and Dads. She and several others gathered backstage at the Ford Park Arena to wait for Trump, many of them holding banners and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the names and photographs of their loved ones. Trump was late, but when he arrived, Golvach recalled later, he seemed captivated by their experiences, listening intently to the horror stories about how their sons and daughters died, and the parents’ grief and sense of powerlessness.
This is important stuff, Trump said. People need to know about this. Trump turned to his campaign staff and told them he wanted the families to join him onstage. During the rally, he interrupted his own comments to call up the parents, one by one, to talk about their loved ones. Golvach felt seen for the first time.
Trump stayed close to the Angel Families, who Miller called the emotional spine of his campaign, invoking their names often in his speeches as proof that his immigration agenda was compassionate. Once he won the presidency, Trump created an office within DHS to help them and named it Voice, or Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. He regularly invited Angel Families to the White House to call attention to their plight, using them as a political counterpoint whenever he was accused of pushing immigration policies that tore families apart.
“When I sit here and listen to somebody talking about families being separated, no one has any compassion for what I’m feeling, except President Trump,” said Golvach, who visited the White House in July 2017 along with other Angel Families. “He’s looked all of us in the face, and he knows our stories, and understands the human tragedy of this.”
The Angel Families provided a powerful anecdotal rationale for Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, but data shows that their tragic stories were the exception, not the rule. Numerous studies have found that immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes or to be behind bars, and there is no evidence that higher levels of immigration lead to higher crime rates; in fact, reputable analyses have shown just the opposite.
In a 2015 report published by the American Immigration Council, a team of researchers wrote, “For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education. In other words, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are not ‘criminals’ by any commonly accepted definition of the term.”
But there was another group of Americans whose misfortunes Trump often invoked when speaking about the evils of immigration, whose plight resonated with voters across the country. They were the “forgotten men and women” who Trump often said had seen their livelihoods devastated by large-scale immigration, and there was plenty of evidence and scholarly research to suggest their plight—that of low-skilled workers who had seen their wages fall and job prospects dwindle because of large-scale immigration—was real.
“Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers,” he said at the Republican National Convention, in a speech that cited the Harvard economist George Borjas and his research. Trump was oversimplifying; most scholars believe there are economic upsides and downsides to immigration, with the potential depressing of wages for some natives offset by the growth in wealth to the country overall. But Trump was not wrong altogether.
A study prepared in 2016 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which looked at immigration trends over the previous two decades, found that immigration had a net-positive impact on the United States economy, a conclusion that would seem to be at odds with what Trump was claiming. But when the analysis examined wages, it found a more complicated dynamic at play. “When measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small,” it said. But there was an important asterisk that Trump would exploit to great effect during his campaign. “To the extent that negative wage effects are found,” the study reported, “prior immigrants—who are often the closest substitutes for new immigrants—are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high school dropouts, who share job qualifications similar to the large share of low-skilled workers among immigrants to the United States.”
In other words, while immigration was positive for the U.S. economy overall, there were clear winners and losers. It benefited employers who had access to a much larger, and therefore cheaper, pool of labor, but could be a threat to workers of similar educational and skill levels. Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump’s candidacy held strong appeal for many of those Americans. In 2016, he won 66 percent of white voters who lacked a college education.