Last Friday, Donald Trump went to Aurora, Colorado in the latest effort of his to highlight a supposed issue of widespread migrant crime. While there, he repeated false claims that the city is overrun with migrants who are Venezuelan gang members and have taken over apartment buildings. Trump has made similar claims regarding the migrant community–this time Haitians–in Springfield, Ohio–who he falsely claimed were eating people’s pets. All of this is a part of the overriding argument that there is a migrant crime crisis in our country, and as such we should deport millions and restrict pathways to legal immigration.

But these claims are false. The mayor of Aurora said “There are no apartment complexes under gang control”, residents of the supposedly gang-controlled apartment buildings disputed the line, and the governor of Ohio called the claims ‘garbage’. In fact, since the Civil War, immigrants have never been incarcerated at a higher rate than native-born citizens, with recent data showing immigrants are incarcerated at less than half the rate. On the contrary, immigrants are significantly more likely to be the victims of crimes than those born in the country.

This rhetoric is not without consequence. The city of Springfield ground to a halt following Trump, his running mate JD Vance, and other Republicans promoting this conspiracy theory as hospitals had to lock down and schools had to close due to bomb threats, while the migrants in the city had to consider moving for their own safety. Meanwhile, xenophobia in Aurora has been a roadblock to opportunities and housing for migrants.

Claims of migrants being a risk to the safety of the country are nothing new. The Know Nothing movement in the mid-19th century was a party with membership of only White, protestant men, whose party positions were primarily centered around anti-immigrant sentiment. While at the time focused on Irish immigrants, the view of immigrants among Know Nothings is reminiscent of that of Trump and his allies in the modern day, as they try to ‘other’ a new group of immigrants, framing them as a risk to the livelihood of ‘true Americans’. This parallel to antebellum rhetoric shows how problematic and extreme this rhetoric is, even if it is unlikely to literally lead to a second Civil War.