Recently, the Trump Administration staged a spectacle on the White House lawn: they put up more than 100 posters featuring mugshots of undocumented immigrants each listing the alleged crime they were accused of. This display was timed to mark a political milestone: President Trump’s 100th day in office, showcasing how immigration enforcement is the centerpiece of his second-term agenda.

Yet, inside the very building behind the posters of immigrants in their mugshots is a man convicted of 34 felonies. His criminal record is rarely treated with the same intensity as those he put on his lawn – I don’t see legitimate news outlets calling him by his crimes’s name. Instead, his legal transgressions are just campaign drama, legal theater, or an electoral twist. Trump is not called a “felon.” He is still somehow, just “Trump.”

Meanwhile, headlines about the mugshots leaned into harmful stereotypes. Phrases like “illegal aliens,” “violent illegals,” and “vicious gangsters” flooded the titles of news articles. A Fox News article went as far as to quote Team Trump saying the display was meant to spotlight “vicious, brutal, illegal alien criminals.” The New York Post repeated this with similar language, fueling the idea that immigrants are inherently dangerous.

But here’s what those headlines won’t showcase: immigrants, including undocumented ones, are statistically less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. That’s a fact. It’s not an opinion.

In a 2020 study published in PNAS, researchers found that U.S. citizens were over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes compared to undocumented immigrants. The study analyzed over 1.8 million arrests in Texas between 2012 and 2018. Similarly, a 2023 report from the Cato Institute, using the Texas Department of Public Safety data, found that native-born U.S. citizens had a 25.7 per 100,000 conviction rate for sexual offenses in 2019, while undocumented immigrants had a rate of 21.6 per 100,000. Legal immigrants had a rate of only 12.0 per 100,000. In other words, native-born citizens were more likely to be convicted of sex crimes than both groups of immigrants.

National data supports the same conclusion. According to the American Immigration Council, immigrants are about 60% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born citizens. The National Academies of Sciences has also found that immigrants are underrepresented in U.S. prisons relative to their share of the population and that this trend has held steady for decades.

Yet, despite all of this, it’s unclear how many of the immigrants shown on the White House lawn had actually been convicted of a crime. The administration offered no transparency about whether the mugshots represented arrests, charges, or confirmed convictions. No new outlets, including ABC7, were able to confirm the identities of those pictured on the lawn Trump’s stunt subverts due process and wastes taxpayer money. Eggs are already expensive but at least the border is secure, right?

But facts rarely matter when it comes to the Trump Administration, they’re too busy fear-mongering. The immigrants’ mugshots on the lawn are not about public safety. They’re about performance. They’re meant to stoke fear among voters, to revive the old “Willie Horton” playbook, and to dehumanize immigrants.

On a better note, outlets like MSNBC reported on the event using terms like “immigrants” and “alleged crimes” not the far-right outlets’ dehumanizing and inflammatory language. CBS News, Axios, and USA Today used neutral language as well, not labeling those displayed on the lawn as threatening. A lot of outlets didn’t cover it at all.

Let’s be clear – if Trump truly really wanted to highlight criminals, there’s no shortage of convicted Republicans whose mugshots they could’ve used. Former Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey was sentenced to 15 years in prison for child sex trafficking. Former Idaho State Representative Aaron Von Ehlinger was convicted of raping a legislative intern and sentenced to 20 years. Ray Holmberg, a North Dakota lawmaker, was just sentenced this week to 10 years in federal prison for traveling to abuse underage boys abroad. Byron “Low Tax” Looper a Tennessee Republican, murdered his opponent to win a state senate seat. And in the most horrifying case, Texas GOP official Bo Michael Dresner was sentenced to 410 years in prison after pleading guilty to the sexual abuse of multiple children.

All of these real people, convicted in courtrooms, many of whom held public office under the Republican banner. Yet no administration has ever printed their mugshots on government property for a public shaming. Because that kind of spectacle isn’t about justice. It’s about whose face you want people to fear.

What this moment makes painfully clear is how deeply this country and much of its media still criminalizes immigrants, especially Latino ones. It’s not just policy. It’s language. It’s visual framing. It’s the choice to call one man’s felonies “politics” while another man’s arrest photo becomes a symbol of evil.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s a reminder of who is allowed to be flawed and forgiven and who is offered no leeway. And this week, as a president with 34 felony convictions turned his lawn into a gallery of immigrants with their mugshots, it’s clearer than ever whose humanity gets protected and whose gets weaponized.