Five Weeks Before the Midterms, a Migrant Caravan Appeared Right on Schedule — and Trump's DHS and White House Sounded "Ominous Warnings" About the Few Hundred People Walking Through Mexico, Even as the Administration Simultaneously Boasts That the Border Is "the Most Secure in History" With "16 Months of Zero Releases"; the Contradiction Was Called Out Not Only by the Left but by Former Trump Loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene: "The GOP Needs to Scare You Into Voting Because Nothing Else Is Working"
In late September 2026, roughly five weeks before the midterm elections, a migrant caravan — the "Faith and Hope" group of a few hundred people, mostly Hondurans and other Central Americans — set out from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and began the long walk north through Mexico. The Trump administration responded as if an invasion were imminent: the Department of Homeland Security issued "ominous warnings," and the White House declared, "The message to the caravan is you will not be allowed into our country." Here is the contradiction that gives the game away. The same administration insists, constantly, that Trump has delivered "the most secure border in history" — 16 straight months of "zero releases," border crossings 94% below the Biden-era average, the lowest apprehensions on record. If all of that is true, a caravan of a few hundred exhausted people on foot, a thousand miles away, is not a threat; it is a non-event that the administration's own airtight border would stop cold. Sounding alarms about it anyway, precisely as ballots are about to be cast, is not border security. It is the oldest trick in the Republican midterm playbook — and this time it was named, bluntly, by one of the movement's own: former Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote, "We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now? Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working."