When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it will annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will become one of the safest places on Earth—which is yet another reason “the Anglo-Saxon elites” want to capture the region from Russia.  

So says Nikolai Patrushev, the second-most powerful man in Moscow. Currently the head of Russia’s Security Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin’s since the two served in the Leningrad KGB in the 1970s and is now the president’s confidant and top adviser. A general of the army and a former director of the FSB—the successor agency to the Soviet KGB—Patrushev is also the de facto overlord of the country’s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he alone appears licensed to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.

Following Putin’s lead, many top Russian bureaucrats compete in conjuring up monstrous conspiracy theories. Yet even in this cracked-up crowd, Patrushev stands out for the luridness and intensity of his anti-West—and especially anti-U.S.—animus. The hyperbole of his comments would make the Soviet propagandists of my youth blush: His prominence is a reminder that, if Putin were to lose power tomorrow, his potential successors could be more warlike and expansionist, not less. Americans should worry about how much Patrushev’s outlook reinforces his boss’s—and about how his delusional, more-belligerent-than-Putin fulminations in long interviews with top-circulation Russian newspapers become the party line, which deafening propaganda then inculcates in the mind of millions of Russians.

In Patrushev’s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium. As early as the 16th century, “Russophobic” Western historians besmirched Russia’s first czar, Ivan IV—a mass murderer and sadist better known as Ivan the Terrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is merely a victim of a concocted “black legend” that “portrayed him as a tyrant.”  

To the Security Council chief, the West’s 20th-century siege of Russia had nothing to do with communism and the Cold War. In fact, the fall of the mighty Soviet Union made the country a softer target for the Western plotters, and the United States strove to exploit the opportunity by forcing Russia to give up its “sovereignty, national consciousness, culture, and an independent foreign and domestic policy.” The conspiracy’s final objectives are Russia’s dismemberment, the elimination of the Russian language, the country’s removal from the geopolitical map, and its confinement to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

In Patrushev’s world, the U.S. invents new viruses in biological-weapons labs to annihilate the peoples of “objectionable states,” and the COVID-19 virus “could have been created” by the Pentagon with the assistance of several of the largest transnational pharmaceutical firms and the “Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros, and Biden foundations.”

Patrushev’s greatest current fixation is “all this story with Ukraine”—a confrontation supposedly “engineered in Washington.” In 2014, by his account, the U.S. plotted the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv—a “coup d’état”—that pushed out a pro-Moscow president and sought to fill Ukrainians with “the hatred of everything Russian.” Today, Ukraine is no more than a testing ground for aging U.S. armaments as well as a place whose natural resources the West would prefer to exploit mercilessly—and “without the indigenous population.” Preserving Ukraine as a sovereign state is not in America’s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid of attacking Russia directly, “NATO instructors herd Ukrainian boys to certain death” in the trenches. Indeed, the West is essentially perpetrating an “annihilation” of the Ukrainians, whereas Russia’s goal is to “put an end to the West’s bloody experiment to destroy the fraternal people of Ukraine.”

This is the picture of the world that Patrushev serves up to Putin. The adviser provides “a framework” for the Russian president’s vision, the prominent Russian political sociologist Nikolai Petrov has argued.

Repeated and internalized by its audience, propaganda captures and imprisons the propagandist. Patrushev said last May that Western special services were training terrorists and saboteurs for “committing crimes on the territory of our country.” Russian civilians have suffered because of that view. Weeks before Islamic State terrorists attacked a music hall in a Moscow suburb late last month, U.S. intelligence officials told the Russian government about a threat to the venue. Putin dismissed the U.S.’s warning as “obvious blackmail” and a “plot to scare and destabilize our society.”

While furnishing his compatriots with elaborately paranoid interpretations of the world, Patrushev vigorously participates in shaping it. More and more a policy maker in his own right, he frequently stands in for Putin in essential negotiations with top allies, reducing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and the signing of meaningless treaties. As the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin has pointed out, Patrushev is where foreign policy meets war. This nexus expands inexorably.

After Russia’s drubbing in Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2022, Patrushev flew to Tehran in November of that year to negotiate the sale of Iranian drones. He has traveled to Latin America to meet with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Patrushev discussed “America-orchestrated color revolutions,” the “destructive activities” of nongovernment organizations, and the dispatching of Cuban troops to Belarus “for training.”

Patrushev works the darker side of Putin’s policies as well. He was likely involved in the 2006 poisoning in London of the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. The attempted killing in Salisbury, England, of the former double agent Sergei Skripal 12 years later would have required his sign-off. Patrushev is also plausibly suspected of firsthand involvement in last August’s killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rebellious commander of the Wagner mercenary group. The judicial murder of the prominent regime opponent Alexei Navalny, too, could not have happened without Patrushev’s approval. Indeed, as the Russian-opposition essayist Alexander Ryklin has pointed out, the only officials who could have authorized the slow execution of Navalny were Putin and Patrushev.

Perhaps most chilling, Patrushev has some sway over Russia’s nuclear strategy. In October 2009, he announced in an interview with the national newspaper Izvestia that Russian nuclear weapons were not just for use in a “large-scale” war. Contrary to the restriction spelled out in the 2000 version of Russian military doctrine, Patrushev proposed that Russia’s nukes could be deployed in a conventional regional conflict or even a local one. He also thought that in a “critical situation,” a preventive strike against an aggressor “may not be excluded.” Four months later, Putin signed a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had suggested, a conflict would no longer have to be “large-scale” for Russia to reach for its atomic bombs and missiles. (Patrushev’s agitation for preventive nuclear attacks has yet to make the text of the doctrine, but Putin’s blunt nuclear blackmail in the past two years suggests that Patrushev may eventually get his wish.)  

In its efforts to understand Russia’s intentions, the United States has tried to get to know Patrushev better. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s first call to Patrushev was on January 25, 2021, five days after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Sullivan and Patrushev would go on to speak on the phone five more times, in addition to meeting in Reykjavik in May of that year. After their conversation in November, according to The New York Times, Patrushev reported discussing ways of “improving the atmosphere of Russian-American relations.” A joint statement indicated that Sullivan and Patrushev had discussed “increasing trust between the two countries.”

[Anna Nemtsova: Putin’s ‘rabble of thin-necked henchmen’ ]

Thirteen weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of no more than a handful of officials who’d known about Putin’s plan—and reportedly a driving force behind it—Patrushev presumably enjoyed weaving a web of dezinformatsiya around his American counterpart.

This would have been all the more gratifying because of the Kremlin’s conviction that time was on Russia’s side. In Patrushev’s view, the West is slowly expiring. European civilization has no future, he has said. Its politics are in the “deepest moral and intellectual decline”; it is headed for the “deepest economic and political crisis.”

America’s downfall is also nigh, portended not only by ashes at Yellowstone but by the nation’s basic geography. The United States is but “a patchwork quilt” that could “easily come apart at the seams.” Furthermore, Patrushev told the main government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the American South could be drifting toward Mexico, whose lands the U.S. grabbed in 1848: “Beyond doubt,” America’s “southern neighbors” will reclaim the stolen lands, and a passive U.S. citizenry will do nothing to preserve the “wholeness” of the country.

In this and many other ways, Patrushev’s worldview will seem utterly alien to most Americans. But his enormous influence underscores that Putin is far from the only force preventing Russian politics from reorienting toward a more liberal regime.   

The pendulum of Russian history has generally oscillated between brutal, bellicose regimes and softer, less repressive autocracies that retreat from confrontation with the West. But this pattern may not hold for the post-Putin future. After a quarter century under Putin, Russia’s secret services, the foundation of his regime, have degraded all other institutions and monopolized power. Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a year older than the president. Yet should he survive Putin, Patrushev is certain to deploy his secret army to help guide the transition and may well have a shot at coming out on top. As he likes to say, truth is on his side.  

Mexico and Ecuador have brought complaints against each other at the international court, escalating a diplomatic feud.

Mexico had earlier appealed to the UN court to sanction Ecuador for storming its embassy in Quito.

Mexico has a tradition of granting asylum, but experts see political motive behind offers made under Lopez Obrador.

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X,  “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia. (Both men, as it turns out, are in favor of some quarter for “insurrectionists” who happen to be on the right side.)

Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’

What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime (another likely pandemic effect, among other factors) and with widespread civil-rights protests.  

The protesters at Columbia and other college campuses around the United States are voicing opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas, which began in retaliation for a Hamas raid that killed some 1,200 Israelis last October. Since then, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 2 million displaced, and many driven to the brink of starvation. No sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism is necessary to believe, as I do, that Israel’s conduct here has been horrifically disproportionate; the U.S. government itself has acknowledged substantial evidence of human-rights violations by Israeli forces as well as by Hamas. There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away for the time being, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters. As of this morning, the National Guard had not been called in, but hundreds of students participating in demonstrations across the country have been arrested.

If the campus authorities need to act to protect the safety of any of their students, including from threats, discrimination, and harassment, then they must. But the university is facing pressure from pro-Israel donors and elected officials to shut down the protests, less because they are dangerous than because these powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive.

Yet the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. The New York Times reported that after Shafik asked the NYPD to clear the protesters’ tent city located on a campus quad, the “decision to bring in the police also unleashed a wave of activism across a growing number of college campuses.” As for Columbia, NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” The arrests did not end the protest.

The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer. The most likely outcome based on past precedent  would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.

Conor Friedersdorf: Against the Insurrection Act

As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters. Social-media bubbles can suffice to maintain this sense of siege among the extremely online, but cultivating this perception among most voters demands constant reinforcement.

This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems, they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

Chinese firms are racing to set up factories in Mexico to bypass US tariffs and sanctions.

Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High, but the mass-shooter era did. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. How could we know we were witnessing an origin story?

The legend of Columbine is fiction. There are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on April 20, 1999, and the story we all accepted back then. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly. A pair of outcast loners dubbed the “Trench Coat Mafia” targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Dwayne Fuselier, the supervisory special agent who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting H. L. Mencken in response to the mythmaking: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The legend hinges on bullying, but the killers never mentioned it in the huge trove of journals, online posts, and videos they left to explain themselves. The myth was so insidious because it cast the ruthless killers as heroes of misfits everywhere. Fuselier warned how appealing that myth would sound to anyone who felt ostracized. Within a few years, the fledgling fandom would find one another on social media, where they have operated ever since.

Around the world, Eric and Dylan are idolized as champions of “the nobodies.” Eric hated the nobodies. He mocked them mercilessly on his website and in his journal. He wasn’t a loner or an outcast, and neither was Dylan. Eric and Dylan made clear in their writings that they were planning the attack for their own selfish motives—certainly not to help the kids they ridiculed at the bottom of the social food chain.

They were not in the Trench Coat Mafia. They were not Nazis or white supremacists, and they did not plan the attack for Hitler’s birthday. They did not target jocks, Christians, or Black people. They targeted no one specifically. They shot randomly and designed their bombs to kill indiscriminately. That’s where “they” ends: Their polar-opposite personalities drove opposite motives. Psychopaths are devoid of empathy; Eric was a sadistic psychopath who killed for his own aggrandizement and enjoyment. Dylan was suicidally depressed and self-loathing. Eric lured him into punishing the world for the pain it inflicted on him, instead of punishing himself. Columbine was a suicide plan, but on “Judgment Day,” as they called it, Dylan would show the world the “somebody” we’d never seen.

The Columbine killers have fans. Eric and Dylan’s adoring online following spreads across nearly every continent, and it’s growing across multiple platforms. In Russia, the government, which has been plagued by an explosion of both Columbine fandom and mass shootings, estimates that more than 70,000 members exist. They call themselves the TCC, for “True Crime Community,” and I’ve spent much of the past 15 years inside their online world. My book Columbine made me enemy No. 1 for portraying Eric and Dylan as ruthless murderers.

In 2016, a young fan tweeted: “hey @DaveCullen block me or else i shoot my school.” She’d been ranting for hours, posting pictures of school shooters, and tweets such as: “It’s also something a lot of people need, To die....I wish i was dead...I LIKE VIOLENCE...I want to be killed in front of an audience. … I think someone failed to abort me (:”

These teens are ensnared in an American tragedy that just keeps growing worse.

I’ve tried to leave this story so many times, but this diagram haunts me, ruthlessly expanding like an unstoppable spider web, devouring all the lives and futures in its path. It demands that we address the cause—25 years too late. That web is made up of 54 mass shootings that have killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 500. And every gunman left evidence that they were inspired or influenced by the murderers at Columbine. The Columbine effect.

Eric and Dylan’s bombs failed. Yet the legend made them heroic to their progeny and gave birth to their fandom. By the tenth anniversary, a small band of “Columbiners” had formed online. They gravitated to the TCC, to Ted Bundy, to the younger Tsarnaev brother, ‎to Dylann Roof, and to others—but Eric and Dylan are the megastars. The groupies multiply, as fresh crops of teens join their ranks each season.

Most gunmen die in the act, so the 54 attacks itemized in the diagram are just the ones that we know of, and that were carried out. A 2015 Mother Jones investigation of Columbine copycats found more than two thwarted attacks for each one that succeeded. It identified 14 plotters targeting Columbine’s anniversary and 13 striving to top its body count. Surviving mass shooters have admitted that they were competing with one another.

All roads lead back to Columbine. The Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, wrote in a school assignment that he wanted to “repeat Columbine” and that he idolized its “martyrs.” The Northern Illinois University killer marked a third generation, explicitly inspired by both Virginia Tech and Columbine. Sandy Hook was the fourth generation; Adam Lanza had studied all three. Six more school shooters later referenced Sandy Hook and Columbine. Five generations of fallout, all reenacting the original legend.

Most early Columbiners were just curious teenagers interested in the criminal mind or in analyzing Columbine. Many still are, and their analyses are often useful. Many are angry about being tarred with the group’s reputation, but they have been outnumbered by new arrivals unabashedly calling themselves fans. Many use the killers’ faces as avatars, extoll their virtues, and compose love poems, fan fiction, and gory memes about them. Sue Klebold said she was shocked by the volume of letters she received calling Dylan “heroic” and by the number of girls saying, “I wish I could have his baby.”

How little these groupies know about the murderers they obsess over is ironic. They keep repeating the misreporting that was debunked decades ago, convinced it’s true because it has metastasized into TCC dogma. The TCC twists the story to recast the murderers as victims; and the dead, wounded, and traumatized as villains. The groupies didn’t start these myths; we in the media bear that shame. But the groupies are now the carriers, spreading the legend of Dylan and Eric to remote reaches of the globe.

Seventy thousand is a tiny fraction of the adolescent population, but a magnet for a dangerous cohort of marginalized, disaffected, and hopeless teens—a major pool of aspiring shooters. Most TCC members outright say that they condone the Columbine murders, often in their profiles. They have turned Eric and Dylan into folk heroes, and they celebrate them as avenging angels. Adam Lanza obsessed over the Columbine killers and spent years immersed in these groups online. Then he murdered 20 little kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Here’s the twist: Most of the TCC members I’ve engaged with describe themselves as awkward outcasts desperate to fit in. The TCC embraces them. The TCC feels cool—Eric and Dylan are super cool—and so they finally feel cool. I find it heartbreaking to hear them describe the pain they endure at school and the affinity they feel for “Dylan” and “Eric,” the fictional characters they’ve constructed. These kids are shocked when I tell them that other members of the TCC have told me the same—that they are putting on the same show, sure that all the others really mean it. Did Adam Lanza believe the posers? We’ll never know, but we can be certain that as you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!

Lots of kids fantasize about killing. Two days after Columbine, Salon ran “Misfits Who Don’t Kill,” in which three people came clean about their youthful fantasies of enacting mass murder. The phenomenon was widely reported that week. But none of those people did anything, because they knew how horribly wrong acting out the fantasy would be. Inside the TCC bubble, the constant message is that if your classmates are tormenting you, killing them is not just moral —it’s heroic and noble.

The TCC has a tell: Actual shootings unnerve them. Their posts grow quiet, respectful, and even mournful after some troubled young person heeds their call. I can gauge the change instantly, because the incessant harassment I get from them stops cold—for a week or two. Parkland was different: Six months went by before the taunts began trickling back in, and I haven’t gotten a death threat in the six years since. Why? I have no way to be certain about this, but my educated guess is that David Hogg, X González, and the rest of the March for Our Lives kids were suddenly cooler than the young shooters. And so much more powerful.

Eric and Dylan weren’t powerful—their plan failed. They’d planned Columbine as a bombing, the primary terrorist tactic. They thought they were launching a three-act drama: The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the “fun” part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history. Eric complained in his journal that his “audience” would fail to understand. He got that right. He got everything else wrong.

Every element fizzled. All of the big bombs failed. Eric and Dylan went down to the cafeteria in a last desperate move to ignite the bombs with gunfire and a Molotov cocktail. Failed. Experts on psychopaths say they get bored after their initial kills, and Eric had likely lost interest. His gun’s recoil had broken his nose, so he spent that time in acute pain. The cops refused to kill them in the blaze of glory that they’d described as their final curtain. The smell of all the blood and already decomposing bodies was overpowering. Out of options, each shot himself in the head.

A more obscene and pathetic way to die is hard to imagine. Yet their fans have never confronted that ugly reality, because the opposite story took hold, making Eric and Dylan masterminds of the “worst school shooting in American history.”

The Columbine effect has gone global. It has inspired mass shootings in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia—as well as knife and axe attacks in places as remote as Siberia. In 2022, Russia designated the online “Columbine movement” a terrorist group. To comply with the ruling, my publisher required me to disavow the group in the Russian translation of Columbine. Mass murder inspired by those inept perpetrators is America’s most revolting cultural export.

I know when the TCC colonizes a new region, because I start getting a barrage of taunts in a different language. It’s a social contagion. Researchers have described school shootings as the American equivalent of suicide bombings—an ideology joined with a tactic. The phenomenon is escalating and self-perpetuating.

The Columbine groupies have no idea that they’re exporting a fraud. The media set this whole thing in motion 25 years ago. To untell a legend is a formidable task. It will be possible only when the media finally begin to convey how pathetic and gruesome the killers’ final moments were. The fans need to hear the ugly truth. Eric and Dylan viciously murdered innocent kids for their own selfish and petty agendas, and they died miserable failures.

This essay is adapted by the author from the new preface to a 25th-anniversary edition of Columbine.

Under the radar in the US border crisis debate is the role of drug cartels preying on migrants.

Speaking at a summit of regional states, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro denounces raid as an 'act of barbarism'.

In the days after the November election in 2020, I traveled from Laredo, Texas, down along the Rio Grande into one of the great heartlands of Mexican America, a place locals proudly refer to by its area code, “the 956.” Along this stretch of the Texas border, towns are up to 98 percent Latino; Spanish is so common that Anglos have to learn the language if they want to order at restaurants. Yet on Election Night, residents had shocked the country by turning out for Donald Trump in record numbers.

In Zapata County, where Trump became the first Republican to win the presidential vote since Warren Harding in 1920, I asked Cynthia Villarreal, a longtime Democratic organizer, what explained Trump’s success after four years of immigration raids and family separation. Villarreal told me that, in South Texas, many Mexican Americans don’t identify as immigrants; her own ancestors lived on the Rio Grande before Texas even existed. In Starr County, where Trump had almost quadrupled Republican turnout, the then–county chair of the GOP, a retired colonel named Ross Barrera, said that he and many other Latinos in Texas wanted a border wall. He felt pity, but no solidarity, for those crossing the border; he explained that some South Texans call them mojaditos—Spanish for the slur “wetback.”

Since 2020, Texas politicians have seemed to absorb the lesson that many Latinos will tolerate border crackdowns. In early 2021, Republican Governor Greg Abbott sent thousands of state police and National Guardsmen into Texas’s southernmost counties as part of his “Operation Lone Star.” Residents appeared to reward him: Even if the police SUVs and razor wire were an eyesore, in the 2022 governor’s election Abbott improved on his 2018 results in almost every border county.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has itself to blame for Texas defying its orders]

But soon, Texas Republicans could test just how harsh an immigration policy Latinos really want. In a raucous legislative session last year, the state’s Republican supermajority sent Abbott a monumental bill, S.B. 4. The law, currently on hold in the courts, would essentially give Texas its own immigration system, making “illegal entry”—traditionally enforced by the federal government—into a state crime. If the law goes into effect, a police officer anywhere in the state will be able to stop, question, and arrest anyone they suspect might have crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Judges will be able to coerce defendants to auto-deport to Mexico by threatening them with serious prison time.

S.B. 4 would go far beyond Operation Lone Star, potentially moving immigration enforcement into the state’s interior. Razor wire along the river is meant to control who gets into the state; policing cities such as Dallas and Houston is about getting people out. Will the Latinos in Texas who have welcomed Republicans’ border crackdown feel the same way if state police start arresting their neighbors?

The history here looks grim for the GOP. When Republicans in California and Arizona tried to create the same sort of “show me your papers” system—California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s S.B. 1070—the measures backfired. Both laws reeked of racial profiling. People who were around in each state, including my father in California, have told me stories from those years. In Latino neighborhoods, many people came to see the laws not as immigration policy, but as a population control: an attempt to make their state less Latino. They responded by organizing into coalitions that eventually eroded Republican power in both states—and perhaps gave birth to the popular assumption that Latinos vote mostly on immigration.

In California, my father was one of the people for whom Prop. 187 fundamentally changed the way they saw themselves and their place in this country. Growing up in a Mexican American family in San Antonio, he didn’t think of himself as an immigrant. Like Villareal’s family, our roots in Texas run deeper than the state, back to when it was called Coahuila y Tejas. And, like Barrera, my dad heard other Mexican kids at his school smear more recent immigrants as mojaditos. When he moved to California in the 1980s, my father thought of himself as a political moderate. He was an entrepreneur and a family man, besides being Mexican by heritage. He voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential race (“Just like everyone else in America,” he joked to me recently).

Things changed when the Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, championed Prop. 187. California was in the midst of a historic immigration surge, and as many as 1.3 million undocumented immigrants were living in the state; Wilson was flagging in his 1994 reelection bid. The measure passed, and he held on to his office. When the law went into effect, it instructed public employees—not just cops, but teachers, nurses, and anyone else who worked for the state—to report anyone they suspected might be undocumented.

“I had to start thinking: Was the name ‘Herrera’ probable cause?” my dad said. Prop. 187 erased the conceptual difference he might have felt between himself and noncitizens. He came to believe that, no matter how he thought of himself, some people in this country would only ever see him as Mexican, as an outsider. He never voted Republican again.

He wasn’t alone. In 1984, 45 percent of Latinos in California had, like my father, voted for Reagan. By 1996, that support had cratered: More than 71 percent of Latinos voted for Bill Clinton (a 16 percent increase over his own 1992 result). Turnout among Latinos in California also increased dramatically each election year after Prop. 187. New Latino voters were far more likely to register as Democrats; in Los Angeles County, for instance, six times as many Latinos registered with the Democratic Party than the GOP.

Prop. 187 “created a multigenerational, anti-Republican coalition” among Latinos in California, Mike Madrid, the political director of the California Republican Party from 1996 to 1998, told me. Madrid, who grew up in a Mexican American family in Sacramento, spent years trying to get Republican campaigns to understand Latinos’ complexity. He thought then, and still thinks today, that the party’s best chance of courting Latino voters was with a message geared toward the working class, an “aspirational conservatism.” But Prop. 187 essentially turned hundreds of thousands of Latinos into single-issue voters. Today some of the more prominent Latino officials in the country, including the former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro and Senator Alex Padilla of California, trace their political roots to their opposition to Prop. 187.

“You can build a multigenerational coalition when a community is perceived to be personally, individually, and as a community under attack,” Madrid said. “If I was naturalized, or my kids were born here, or my grandchildren—everyone came home” to Democrats after Prop. 187. (Madrid clashed with the Republican Party in a very public way when Donald Trump was nominated in 2016.)

[From the March 2022 issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]

Prop. 187 died in the courts; judges ruled that it violated the supremacy clause in the Constitution and infringed on the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. Almost 15 years would pass before Republicans tried again, this time in Arizona, where Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070 in 2010. Seeking to stop undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, the law mandated that all immigrants over age 18 carry their “papers” with them at all times, and it empowered cops to arrest anyone caught without proper ID.

Academics are still studying how S.B. 1070 changed Arizona. When the bill passed, the state had not only a Republican governor but two Republican senators. Now a Democrat is in the governor’s mansion, along with one and a half Democrats in the senate (Kyrsten Sinema became an independent in 2022). Since S.B. 1070, turnout has exploded in Latino communities, far outstripping population growth. In 2008, just 291,000 Latinos voted in Arizona. By 2012, turnout had increased to 400,000; by 2016, it was more than 550,000. Voter registration has heavily favored Democrats. According to analysis by Televisa Univision, as of 2022, just 17 percent of Latinos in Arizona are registered as Republican, compared with 44 percent as Democrats and 39 percent as independents.

In 2020, more than 813,000 Latinos showed up to vote in Arizona. While some Latino communities in Arizona saw a rightward shift, it was much more muted than it was in Texas; some areas even shifted left. In all, Latino Arizonans voted overwhelmingly for President Joe Biden, sealing his victory in the state.

Underneath Biden’s win was a large network of activists and a get-out-the-vote infrastructure that had first gotten organized in response to S.B. 1070. Belén Sisa, who immigrated with her parents from Buenos Aires at the age of 6, was in high school when the law passed. “I was homecoming queen, varsity cheerleader—like, the last person you would think would be the undocumented girl,” she told me. On the school bus each morning in Florence, Arizona, she looked out at an ICE detention center that employed some of her classmates’ parents, and imagined getting locked up there.

In the years after the law passed, Sisa and her family saw cities like nearby Mesa become relative “ghost towns” as immigrants left the state in large numbers. Sometimes, her family watched protests, but they were too frightened to join in. When Sisa went to college at Arizona State University, she began meeting other undocumented young people, many of whom had started openly identifying as “Dreamers.” She became part of a group of activists that grew throughout the state, often supporting Democrats’ electoral efforts. By 2020, Sisa herself was working as the national Latino press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down the sections of S.B. 1070 that made immigration violations state crimes—though it allowed Arizona police to continue to question the immigration status of the people they stopped or detained. At the time, some wondered whether the Supreme Court had handed a victory to Democrats by keeping part of the law in place, because of how strong Latino opposition to it was.

Sisa recalled having conversations with other Latinos, some of whom had citizenship.“I could say: ‘You’re a lot closer to my situation than you will ever be to people that are white and born here,’” she said.

As any Texan will tell you, things are different down here. Latinos in the state are more socially conservative than their counterparts farther west. Not only do many of them not see themselves as immigrants—many identify as racially white. Across the country, immigrants are also becoming a smaller percentage of the Latino population. It’s tough to predict how S.B. 4 will play out if it goes into effect.

“Unlike, say, people in New York, I think Hispanics in Texas are more open to the idea that we need to close that border and do the right thing,” Jason Villalba, who served as a Republican in the Texas house from 2013 to 2019, told me.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Texas pulls an ugly stunt on the border]

As controversy around S.B. 4 has grown, and connections to laws like Prop. 187 have been drawn, some Republican architects of the bill have begun signaling that they intend for the law to target recent border crossers, not immigrants already living in the state. Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson told judges at a hearing last week, “There wouldn’t be probable cause in almost all cases, unless a Texas officer sees somebody crossing the border.” Abbott has been ambiguous: After the law was blocked, he said, “Texas has the legal authority to arrest people coming across the razor-wire barriers on our border.”

But legislators have frequently referred to statewide enforcement. When the Fort Worth chief of police released a video in March arguing that immigration enforcement should be left to the feds, Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house, wrote on X: “Any local law enforcement agency that refuses to enforce Senate Bill 4 is abandoning their sworn duty to uphold the rule of law.” State Senator Charles Perry, the author of the bill, has said in interviews that Texas essentially was forced to pass S.B. 4, because of what lawmakers see as inaction by the Biden administration. The Constitution makes exceptions to federal supremacy during times of “invasion,” and Perry and other Republicans argue that migration constitutes an invasion, one that the feds have failed to prevent. “We’re not challenging federal supremacy. We’re saying you got supremacy. You just chose not to do anything with it. We’re going to take that role for you,” Perry told conservative news site The Texan. (Perry did not respond to an interview request.)

Villalba, the former Republican lawmaker, told me he is a believer in border security; for him, and for many other Latinos in Texas, the fact that the state wants more of a say in what happens on its own border makes sense. “But this is different,” he said about S.B. 4. “On a Saturday afternoon, when I take my son to go play hockey, and I’m wearing a baseball cap, and, you know, and a T-shirt that might not be as clean and crisp as I normally wear, and I have brown hair and brown eyes and brown skin, are they going to do that to me”—ask for his papers—“in front of my son?”

Deep south in the Rio Grande Valley, Tania Chavez is the executive director of LUPE, a direct-aid organization founded by the labor-rights icon Cesar Chavez (no relation). She and her team have spent months running “know your rights” clinics for community members to help them prepare for S.B. 4. She said she has talked with parents about what will happen if they get arrested. “Who’s going to take legal guardianship of their kids? … Who else is listed on your bank account? … What is going to happen to your property? Those are all the things that we’re planning and thinking,” she told me. At one recent meeting, Chavez said she saw something she hadn’t seen before: Two groups of young people had driven all the way from Houston and Corpus Christi to join.

“We’re starting to see a lot of new faces,” she said.

On March 19, the Supreme Court briefly allowed S.B. 4 to go into effect, sending the law back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges issued a new injunction less than 24 hours later. Oral arguments are ongoing, and Texas’s defense has gotten less vociferous. Last week, Nielson, Texas’s lawyer, told judges: “Now, to be fair, maybe Texas went too far. And that’s the question this court is going to have to decide.”

But, during those few hours the law was in effect, I felt an alien thought cross my mind as I sat in my home in Austin: Should I start carrying my passport? I won’t exaggerate how worried I felt; I’m insulated by citizenship and light-beige skin. Just having that thought, however, made me dissociate: It was like someone else had forced the worry into my brain.

It’s a species of fear many people live with daily. In the Rio Grande Valley, Chavez spent two decades of her life undocumented; she knows what it’s like driving to work each day wondering if a broken taillight will bring her time in this country to an end. She said that feeling is what gets many young citizens engaged in organizing in the Valley.

But when asked if she thinks S.B. 4 might change the minds of Latinos who aren’t immigrants, who have so far supported Texas’s border crackdown, Chavez was dubious.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen until those people start getting arrested,” she said.