How the Far Right Reports on the Border

A few days before the election, Wid Lyman, a reporter for Border Hawk News, a right-wing news site, drove to Mt. Cristo Rey, a hiking path on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas. He parked near a grouping of picnic tables and clipped a pair of gloves to the belt loops of his tactical pants. “This is our standard bring,” he said, zipping up his backpack. “We’ve got some kind of medical, we’ve got our waterproof pack, and our drone is in there, too.” The well-marked, two-mile trail up the mountain is a popular pilgrimage site on Good Friday; at other times, it’s favored by dog-walkers and early-morning exercisers.

The area has also been used by groups of migrants crossing the border, and the guides and scouts helping them. They were who Lyman was hoping to find. Midway up the mountain, he stopped to survey crumpled plastic bottles in an arroyo: possible evidence, he believed, of human trafficking. “I’ve seen this all across the entire border, this exact thing—water and energy drinks,” he said. After about an hour, he reached the crest of the mountain, marked by a twenty-nine-foot limestone statue of Jesus Christ. A group of nursing students sat in a sliver of shade, talking about television shows. Below, the desert floor was bisected by the thin black line of the border wall. Lyman squatted to assemble the drone. It hovered for a moment, humming, before he sent it off to fly along the spine of the wall, careful not to let it veer into Mexico. He peered at the video screen, frowning. “Nothing today. No scouts, even,” he said apologetically. “It’s good for the country but bad for shock journalism.”

Lyman spends roughly half the year as a travelling physical therapist and the other half making videos for Border Hawk, a four-year-old site that posts aggregated news and original content about immigration. He’s part of a growing network of right-wing content creators—filmmakers, podcasters, streamers, and self-styled citizen journalists—who populate a media ecosystem that thrives on social media and has been crucial to Donald Trump’s rise. If your algorithmic feed isn’t tuned to this type of thing, you might never come across Border Hawk’s posts, but plenty of people have: Lyman’s videos have been replayed on Fox News and cited by Trump and Kari Lake. His most widely shared video, which depicted a chaotic protest outside the White House against the invasion of Gaza, racked up tens of millions of views.

At a time when newsrooms are laying off staff and closing international bureaus, independent journalists are travelling to the Darién Gap and camping out at the border wall, producing media that ranges from the benign to the propagandistic.

Border Hawk presents itself as a grassroots organization offering an honest view of the southern border. But the site is intimately entwined with a long-standing anti-immigrant movement that, until recently, was widely rejected. It was initially an offshoot of U.S., Inc., an umbrella organization founded by John Tanton, an ophthalmologist, environmentalist, and white nationalist who’s been called “the architect of the modern-day anti-immigrant movement.” (Tanton died in 2019.) Border Hawk also shares contributors and staff with VDARE, a virulently anti-immigrant Web site founded by Peter Brimelow, who has described himself as a believer in “racial nationalism.” (Brimelow suspended VDARE this year, after it claimed to be insolvent from paying fines incurred when he refused to comply with a subpoena from the New York attorney general, Letitia James.) Border Hawk is a nonprofit, and cannot endorse political parties or candidates, but the site has consistently depicted the border as out of control, and migrants as criminals and invaders.

I met Wid Lyman earlier this year, when we were both covering the murder trial of an Arizona rancher accused of shooting a migrant. (The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and the prosecution declined to retry the rancher.) We quickly figured out that we were on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but trials are long and dull and can make for unexpected temporary friendships. During the day, we’d chat about which witnesses seemed evasive and find ourselves generally in agreement; in the evenings, from my hotel room, I would watch him on Infowars, opining about the wide-open border. A few months after the trial, he agreed to let me tag along with him for a day as he drove around Texas and New Mexico, making videos for Border Hawk.

After our uneventful trip up the mountain, Lyman drove across the state line into New Mexico, a transition marked by a sudden proliferation of marijuana dispensaries. We passed by a casino-hotel complex where Lyman had slept on his first visit here, a few years ago. The hotel was nice, but it was within walking distance of the wall, so he doesn’t stay there anymore. “I would drive to the border wall two minutes away, and then I’d drive back to the hotel. I was, like, ‘Man, that’s too close,’ ” he said.

As Lyman tells it, for most of his life he was more interested in sports than politics. He and his older brother, Dan, grew up in Amherst, where their father was a professor at the University of Massachusetts and their mother, Izzy, who also has a Ph.D., was an evangelist for homeschooling. Wid speculated that the liberal environment of New England pushed his mother’s politics rightward. Whatever the reason, the Lymans have made fearmongering about immigrants into a family business. Izzy is the editor of “Victims of Illegal Immigration,” an essay collection with a lurid blood-splattered cover, published by Social Contract Press, another U.S., Inc. project. Dan is the president and editor-in-chief of Border Hawk, as well as an occasional contributor to Infowars. In an interview with Peter Brimelow, the VDARE founder, posted on X earlier this year, Dan Lyman called ending birthright citizenship “a no-brainer” and warned of “the destruction of white America” by immigration.

Wid, who told me that he’s “more moderate” than other members of his family, got involved with border politics more recently. His work as a physical therapist dried up during the pandemic; then, in September of 2021, Izzy offered a suggestion. Thousands of Haitian migrants were camped out in squalid conditions under a bridge at the border in Del Rio, Texas. What if Lyman went down there, checked out what was going on, maybe made some videos?

It wasn’t immediately clear that Wid would make it as a citizen journalist. He had no reporting or filming experience, and his Spanish is limited. “I was totally overwhelmed; I had no idea what I was doing,” he said. On that first trip, he spent a day in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, where he was surprised to see the industries that catered to, and sometimes exploited, migrants: reselling their discarded clothing; providing protection that could resemble extortion. His posts, which he shared on his personal account, were a modest success. Soon, his brother enlisted him to work for Border Hawk, and he began travelling from his home, in Michigan, to Texas, Arizona, and California.

It was a fortuitous time to be making content about immigration. A year after Lyman’s first trip to Del Rio, Elon Musk—who has posted about immigrants relentlessly, and often misleadingly—bought Twitter (now X). Right-wing creators who had once been banned were now promoted; the site is Border Hawk’s “bread and butter,” Lyman told me. (Dan Lyman declined to be interviewed about its operations.) People all over the country were eager for information about what, exactly, was going on at the southern border, and they were increasingly turning to alternative sources to get it.

Trump sometimes acts as though he presided over an era of unprecedented calm at the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, the number of migrant encounters with Border Patrol doubled during the first three years of his Administration. (The number nearly doubled once more during the first three years of Joe Biden’s Presidency, although it has recently levelled off.) People were on the move, fleeing violent regimes, climate disruption, and, later, pandemic-devastated economies. Information and misinformation about how to journey to the U.S. circulated on social media, and people for whom the trek might have once seemed prohibitively daunting decided to chance it. Migrant demographics were shifting, too—there were proportionally fewer men and more women and children; proportionally fewer people from Central America and more from Africa, Europe, and Asia; fewer economic migrants and more asylum seekers. The Darién Gap, a thick swath of jungle between Panama and Colombia, long considered impassable, became a migrant corridor—a million people crossed through it between 2021 and 2024, more than ten times as many as during the decade before.

It is well known and well supported that immigrants—including those in the country illegally—have lower arrest rates than native-born Americans; that areas with a higher proportion of immigrants do not have higher crime rates; and that immigrants are a crucial part of the U.S. economy, as, without steady inflows, the nation’s population would likely decline. But Congress hadn’t passed meaningful immigration reform in decades, and old systems were strained by new realities. Smuggling people across the border, once something of a mom-and-pop operation, increasingly came under the control of organized crime. Asylum seekers were given court dates years in the future; case backlogs climbed to nearly three million last year. In U.S. border towns, systemic dysfunction manifested as disorder and, at times, as tragedy: migrants died of extreme heat while crossing Texas ranches, and dozens of children drowned in the Rio Grande. The number of high-speed car chases in Texas border counties rose sharply. Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, began busing migrants to Democrat-run cities, where strained nonprofits struggled to help new arrivals get on their feet. When there weren’t enough shelter beds, people slept on the streets.

Amid all of this, Border Hawk cultivated a growing audience for stories that blamed migrants themselves for the growing chaos. The site provided a steady stream of stories about crimes committed by migrants, and often elided distinctions between them: people who had been granted Temporary Protected Status; asylum seekers who had applied to enter or remain in the country; and people who had crossed illegally and attempted to elude Border Patrol were all lumped together as “illegals.” The stories were often suggestive, leaving plenty of room for the imagination to fill in the gaps. One of Lyman’s videos included footage of him walking through a drainage tunnel in El Paso. When Lyman appeared on Fox News, earlier this year, the host Laura Ingraham played the clip above a chyron that read “Illegals using drainage tunnels to cross border.” In his interview, Lyman mentioned “tons of evidence of traffic,” including “very small footprints.” But he also said that the tunnels, which are part of the city’s municipal infrastructure, do not cross the border, and Lyman told me that he didn’t encounter anyone inside them.

As his work got more attention, Lyman heard from influencers and video-game streamers wanting to get in on the border-content boom. When he declined to let them film with him—“The last thing I want is to be chaperoning some Zoomer,” he told me—they’d sometimes ask him where they could go to capture dramatic footage. Where were the caravans, the crowds surging through gaps in the wall? They didn’t seem to understand that such instances were few and far between.

“Some days, this is how it goes,” Lyman said. We’d been cruising the border for a few hours and the most suspicious thing we’d seen was the trash in the arroyo. Earlier in the year, Biden had enacted strict policies effectively banning asylum between ports of entry, and Mexico had ramped up enforcement. Since then, the number of crossings had declined significantly, Lyman allowed. After lunch, we drove back into Texas. Lyman, armed with an enormous iced coffee from Dunkin’, seemed to be in better spirits. He thought that action might pick up around the Border Patrol’s afternoon shift change. We cruised along the wall for a couple of miles, then parked a few feet from the border. Some sections of the fence consisted of a line of thick metal bollards; in others, it was a metal mesh. Every ten minutes or so, a Border Patrol vehicle drove by, and Lyman waved. The agents didn’t always appreciate being filmed; he told me that he sometimes had to politely but firmly remind them of his rights.

Lyman believed Border Hawk was filling a gap left by more established news organizations. As he saw it, the mainstream media had damaged its credibility by first obsessing over supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election and, later, by underplaying Biden’s cognitive decline. In Lyman’s search for non-compromised news sources, he’d followed a few far-left accounts and sometimes appreciated what he learned there. (“My understanding was when the Haitian people took over their country, they ruined it. They kicked the whites out,” he’d told me, earlier that day. But he’d recently learned, via the journalist Aaron Mate, that “the U.S. government to a certain degree caused this.”) By and large, though, in Lyman’s view, conservatives were the new gonzo journalists, the ones sending back authentic reports from high-drama situations, disdainful of institutions and politically correct messaging.

Lyman granted that some independent journalists amplified prejudice to boost engagement. But he saw his videos as nonideological. “I try to just be factual. I would describe what I do as video reporting, not true journalism,” he told me. “We’re on the mountain. We see what we see.”

The border wall’s shadow lengthened as the sun dipped low; the day was winding down, and we hadn’t seen much. Lyman jokingly peeked at my notebook. “Make sure to describe me as ‘very fit,’ ” he said. In the gap between the border fence’s bollards, he spied two figures walking away from the border wall, farther into Mexico. They were ant-size, and it was difficult to distinguish anything about them, but Lyman pegged them as scouts. “My best guess is they brought a group over, and now they’re going back,” he said. He launched the drone to try to get a better look at them, but he couldn’t find them on the video feed. Instead, he scrutinized a long rectangular building not far from the road. “I bet they keep people here,” he mused. “Like a stash house of some variety.”

When I checked Border Hawk’s Web site later that week, I saw a video of the drone footage that Lyman had shot that morning from the top of Mt. Cristo Rey. The post called it “Cartel Mountain” and “a hotbed for criminal activity and human smuggling.” The camera moved slowly, tracking the path of the border wall, backed by a haunting, ominous soundtrack. If you didn’t read the text, the video was calm, and almost beautiful—broad desert flats stretching between mountains. Somewhere just out of the frame, there was a statue of a man lifting his hands to the sky. ♦