The New York Times International - 07.08.2019

6 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-in- ducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter. Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election mes- saging. A review of Mr. Trump’s tweets also found repeated references to an “invasion,” while his 2016 campaign advertising heavily featured dark warnings about immigrants breaching the United States’ borders. Mr. Trump’s language on immigration — particularly his use of the word “invasion” — is under scrutiny after the mass shooting in El Paso on Saturday. The suspect in that shooting, which left 22 people dead, appeared to be the author of a manifesto declaring that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Divisive and often false claims about undocumented immigrants have been a cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s political strategy for years, from the “build the wall” chants at his 2016 campaign rallies to his warnings about a migrant caravan ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. In his re-election campaign, Mr. Trump has spent an estimated $1.25 million on Facebook ads about immigration since late March, according to data from Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic communications company that is tracking the digital political advertising of presidential candidates. Those ads rep- resent a significant portion of the roughly $5.6 million that Mr. Trump has spent on Facebook advertising during that period. Most of the “invasion” ads began running between January and March, though a few dozen began running in May. Many of the ads began with a blunt message — “We have an INVASION!” — and went on to say, “It’s CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION.” Mr. Trump’s campaign, like other ad- vertisers, runs many different Facebook ads using text or visuals that vary. Ads

with the word “invasion” make up a small portion of the ads the Trump campaign has run on Facebook this year. (Facebook’s archive of political ads, which dates to May 2018, says it con-

tains more than 240,000 Trump ads.) There is no evidence that Mr. Trump’s Facebook ads directly influenced the author of the manifesto, who wrote that his views “predate Trump” and posted the

document on 8chan, an online forum known as a haven for extremists. But Mr. Trump, through his speeches, tweets and campaign ads, has elevated the idea of an “invasion,” once a fringe

view often espoused by white national- ists, into the public discourse. Some other Republican candidates have echoed Mr. Trump’s language in their ads. “Let’s call this what it is — an invasion of our country,” read a recent Facebook ad for Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach who is running for Senate in Alabama. Other Re- publicans who have used the word “invasion” in Facebook ads include a candidate for governor in West Virginia and a candidate for Senate in North Carolina. The cognitive linguist George Lakoff said the word “invasion” was a potent one for Mr. Trump to use because of what it allowed him to communicate. “If you’re invaded, you’re invaded by an en- emy,” he said. “An invasion says that you can be taken over inside your own country and harmed, and that you can be ruled by people from the outside.” Mr. Lakoff added: “When he’s saying ‘invasion,’ he’s saying all of those things. But they’re unconscious. They’re auto- matic. They’re built into the word ‘invasion.’ ” For the writer of the manifesto, the concept of an “invasion” had an addi- tional, racist meaning: He promoted a conspiracy theory called “the great re- placement,” which claims that an effort is underway to replace white people with nonwhite people. Democratic candidates for president blamed Mr. Trump for helping spread such views. “White supremacy is not a mental illness,” Senator Elizabeth War- ren of Massachusetts said on Monday. “We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism. And we need to call out Don- ald Trump for amplifying these deadly ideologies.” But the radio host Rush Limbaugh at- tacked Democrats and the news media on Monday for pointing the finger at conservatives like him. “We’re sick and tired, every time this happens, people that we believe in being blamed for it,” he said. “We’re sick of it. None of us pulled the trigger, none of us want these things to happen, and yet we turn on the media and that’s what we hear.” Stoking fear about immigrants has been central to the Trump campaign’s advertising strategy since his team first began airing political commercials during the 2016 race. The campaign’s first ad of that election focused on “radical Islamic terrorism” in the aftermath of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., with footage of people seemingly flooding across a border. (The footage was from Morocco, not the United States.) Mr. Trump also proposed a “total and com- plete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after the attack.

Scenes evoking illegal immigration became common during the 2016 effort, and Mr. Trump painted a picture of an America overwhelmed by immigrants. “We don’t have a country right now,” he said in footage shown in one ad. “We have people pouring in, they’re pouring in, and they’re doing tremendous dam- age.” The use of alarmist language and imagery about immigrants has a history in the modern Republican Party that dates to the divisive political battles over illegal immigration in the 1990s. One of the most infamous depictions of migrants as a threat came from a 1994 ad from Gov. Pete Wilson of California that showed a group of people rushing through a border crossing. “They keep coming,” the announcer said. Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party gave those kinds of messages a higher platform and a larger mouthpiece as conservative media outlets like Fox News amplified his words. He seized on the “invasion” imagery again in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, when he claimed without evidence that a caravan of migrants mak- ing its way north toward the border had been infiltrated by “criminals and un- known Middle Easterners.” The president and fellow Republicans warned of waves of violence, drugs and crime that awaited the country if it were led by Democrats, who were portrayed as supporting policies that would weak- en national security. That effort did not have the desired effect, as Republicans lost control of the House. Customs and Border Protection re- corded more than 144,000 arrests at the southwestern border in May, the highest monthly total in 13 years. Arrests de- clined by 28 percent in June and were expected to continue to fall through July, according to officials in the Department of Homeland Security. The estimated $1.25 million that the Trump campaign has spent on immigration ads on Facebook since late March is a significant sum when compared with the amount of money the Democratic presidential candidates are spending on Facebook ads. (The spending figures include both Facebook and Instagram.) Over the same period, no Democratic candidate spent more than $2.1 million on Facebook ads, according to Bully Pul- pit; only Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and former Vice President Jo- seph R. Biden Jr. topped $2 million through Saturday.

Harsh glare on Trump’s ‘invasion’ ads

WASHINGTON

Claims that U.S. is overrun by immigrants face scrutiny after massacre of Latinos

BY THOMAS KAPLAN

President Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook since January that include the word “invasion,” and as of late March it has spent an estimated $1.25 million on advertisements about immigration on the social media site.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Reporting was contributed by Nick Cora- saniti in New Jersey, and Zolan Kanno- Youngs and Jeremy W. Peters in Wash- ington.

A reconstruction of the Washington outbreak provides a rare look into how these forces play out. The New York Times reviewed government documents, medical records and emails of scientists and public health officials, as well as conducted interviews with vic- tims, investigators, industry executives and others involved. Those industry officials argued in documents and interviews that farmers needed protection against regulators and scientists who could unfairly harm their business by blaming it for a food- poisoning outbreak when the science was complex and salmonella endemic in livestock. The tension mirrors a broader distrust in agriculture and other business about the intention of federal regulators and other government overseers. “Have you ever heard of the phrase, ‘I’m from the government. I’m here to help you’ — and you know they’re going to screw you?” said David J. Hofer, the secretary-treasurer of the Midway Hut- terite Colony, a religious community that runs a hog farm in Conrad, Mont. Mr. Hofer said he was one of the farmers who objected to the farm inspections during the outbreak. “They might have public health in mind, but they don’t care if in the process they break you.” In the end, Mikayla Porter survived, but the threat of the infection that nearly killed her continues — not least because investigators still lack access to essen- tial data.

A DANGER GROWS There are 2,500 different types of salmonella. The one that infected Mikayla is called 4,5,12:i-minus. It first showed up in the late 1980s in Portugal, and then in Spain, Thailand, Taiwan, Switzerland and Italy. In the United States, infections it causes have risen 35 percent over the past decade, while the overall rate of salmonella infections has stayed constant. The strain typically resists four major antibiotics: ampicillin, streptomycin, sulfisoxazole and tetracycline. “We can see resistance is really in- creasing,” said Dr. Robert V. Tauxe, di- rector of the division of foodborne, wa- terborne and environmental diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention. This particularly virulent strain of salmonella is just one of a growing num- ber of drug-resistant germs that put farm families, and meat eaters general- ly, at risk. A study in Iowa found that workers on pig farms were six times more likely to carry multidrug-resistant staph infections, notably MRSA. A study in North Carolina found that children of pig workers were twice as likely to carry MRSA

than children whose parents didn’t work in a swine operation. Those germs can also wind up on pork sold to consumers. An analysis of government data by the Environmental Working Group, a research organiza- tion, found that 71 percent of pork chops at supermarkets in the United States carried resistant bacteria, second only to ground turkey, at 79 percent. Like many outbreaks of resistant infections, the salmonella variant that sickened Mikayla is usually so widely dispersed that the C.D.C. has had a hard time tracking it.

But in the Washington outbreak, the infection was new to the region, and tests revealed the bug had the same ge- netic profile in patients, creating ideal conditions for scientific detective work. “This was our real opportunity,” said Allison Brown, a C.D.C. epidemiologist. “Everything lined up.”

A CELEBRATION TURNS DIRE The Porter family had invited friends and neighbors to the pig roast to cele- brate a major life change: In three days, they would be moving to Costa Rica. But the day after the roast, Mikayla felt sick, and by 4:30 a.m. the following morning, she had diarrhea so severe that her parents took her to the emer- gency room. There, a doctor said she had a stom- ach bug, assuring them it would pass and approving her to travel. Her parents also felt sick, but not as seriously, and they flew to Costa Rica as planned. After arriving, Mikayla got much worse, excreting mucus and blood. She lay in agony on the couch, the family dogs sitting beside her protectively. A doctor at BeachSide Clinic near Tamarindo, the town where the family had rented a house, prescribed the antibiotic azithromycin, medical records show. It did not work. The family returned to the clinic the next day. That is when Dr. Andrea Messeguer told Mikayla’s parents their daughter could die, and helped arrange the airlift to Hospital CIMA in the capi- tal, San José. There, doctors determined that Mikayla had a systemic infection. She received intravenous hydration and antibiotics. Tests came back from the national lab showing the drug-resistant salmonella strain.

Back in Washington, many others were also getting sick. On July 19, Nicholas Guzley Jr., a po- lice officer, ate pork at a restaurant in Se- attle, and at 2 a.m. threw up in the shower. The medical ordeal that fol- lowed was so excruciating — vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding, a fever of 103.9 de- grees, dehydration and multiple hospital visits — that he said it was worse than a near-death experience in 2003 when he had been hit by a truck. “If you stack up all the pain from all the injuries, this blew it away,” he said. On July 23, the head of Washington’s Department of Health sent out an alert, warning that 56 people had fallen ill and publicizing an investigation into the outbreak by the state’s health and agriculture agencies, coordinating with the C.D.C. The Washington State epidemiologist, Dr. Scott Lindquist, took the lead. Dr. Lindquist and his team discovered that many of the infected roast pigs had come from a slaughterhouse called Kapowsin Meats. Tests of 11 samples taken from slaughter tables, knives, hacksaws, transport trucks and other spots showed that eight were positive for the resistant strain. At Kapowsin, the state investigators spoke to the federal official responsible for inspecting the slaughterhouse, who suggested that they look for the farms where the tainted pork had come from.

THE HEART OF AN OUTBREAK Records obtained by the state showed that many of the pigs supplied to Kapowsin originated on industrial farms in neighboring Montana. On Aug. 13, state records noted that the investigative team — including the C.D.C. and the federal Agriculture De- partment — was in touch with officials in Montana to discuss gaining access to the farms. Determining where the outbreak originated would have allowed the team to trace other possibly infected pork, recall it and advise the owners on how to change their practices. But such investigations are ex- tremely sensitive because the publicity can be bad for business, and because the law protects farmers in such situations. Over all, the government has little au- thority to collect data on farms. “We have people in the slaughterhouses every day, all day long,” said Paul Kieker, the acting food safety administrator at the Agriculture Department. “We don’t have a lot of jurisdiction on farms.” The Food and Drug Administration is charged with collecting antibiotic use data. But farms are not required to pro- vide it and only do so voluntarily. As a result, the federal government has no information about the antibiotics

used on a particular farm and no way to document the role of the drugs in accel- erating resistance. “I haven’t been on a farm for years,” said Tara Smith, a professor at Kent State University and an expert on the connection between resistance and livestock. “They’ve closed their doors to research and sampling.”

INVESTIGATORS ARE TURNED AWAY Dr. Lindquist, the epidemiologist lead- ing the investigation of the Washington outbreak, pleaded with Montana’s health agency to help him gain access to the farms that had supplied the Kapowsin slaughterhouse. In a memo to state officials, he told them that such infections were increas- ing rapidly and that “on-farm investigations will help us better understand the ecology of salmonella” and “prevent fu- ture human illnesses.” Days later, he received a phone call from Dr. Liz Wagstrom, the chief veteri- narian for the National Pork Producers

Council, a group that lobbies on behalf of the livestock industry. Its campaign do- nations to congressional candidates have more than doubled in the past decade, to $2 million in 2018, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Dr. Wagstrom sought to find out what Dr. Lindquist had learned in his investigation and what he was saying to the news media, he said, recalling the con- versation. He said she was worried the pig farms might be unfairly tarnished, arguing that salmonella was common on farms, so an investigation wouldn’t prove anything, even if the infection was detected. The industry soon became more involved. Officials from the National Pork Board joined regular crisis conference calls during the investigation, along with numerous state and federal health and agriculture officials. The board is a group of pork industry executives whose members are elected by the industry and then appointed by the secretary of agriculture, cementing

a tight bond between business and government. Dr. Lindquist initially welcomed the executives’ presence, given their exper- tise, though he did not know who had initially invited them.

RULES WITH BIG LOOPHOLES That same year, F.D.A. guidelines went into effect that were supposed to enable the tracking of antibiotics on farms. They required farms to obtain prescrip- tions from veterinarians to dispense antibiotics and only to animals sick or at risk of illness. The guidelines said that farms must stop using antibiotics as “growth promoters.” But the rules have loopholes, which were highlighted a year earlier when officials from the F.D.A., the C.D.C., the Agriculture Department and the Pew Charitable Trusts met at the University of Tennessee. The group heard from Thomas Van Boeckel, an expert in sta- tistical modeling and antibiotic resistance who was then at Princeton. Dr. Van Boeckel told the group that he could build maps showing changing levels of antibiotic use on farms and com- pare them with changing levels of resistance. To do so, he said, he needed data sets by region or, better yet, by farm. “I was told there was a single data point per year, literally,” he said. That data point: Around 33 million pounds of medically important antibiotics, a 26 percent increase from 2009, were sold in the United States for farm use. The figure, collected from sales data by the F.D.A., was the sum total of the information they were able to pro- vide him. Dr. Van Boeckel told the group that without more specific information, he couldn’t do any real measurement. “They said: Yeah, that’s going to be challenging.” As the end of August neared, Mikayla Porter had stabilized, but in Washington State, the salmonella caseload contin- ued to grow. On Aug. 26, Kapowsin agreed to cease operations, in cooperation with the state. The next day, there was a recall of 523,380 pounds of its pork products. At the same time, the Montana Pork Producers Council wrote to the Wash- ington health agency, saying that it was “clear that there is little to no value in conducting on-farm investigations,” and that investigators should focus on slaughterhouses. By Sept. 22, the case load had hit 178 known infections, with 29 people hospi- talized, but the outbreak was petering out. The investigation ended, Dr. Lindquist said, “with a whimper.”

Tainted pork, and an investigation thwarted

Mikayla Porter being treated for salmonella in a hospital in Costa Rica in 2015.

THE PORTER FAMILY

“We have people in the slaughterhouses every day, all day long. We don’t have a lot of jurisdiction on farms.”

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The New York Times International - 07.08.2019

Harsh glare on Trump’s ‘invasion’ ads

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