Fox News spent the first months of 2024 blaming President Joe Biden for an unverifiable surge of violent “migrant crime” as the right-wing network geared up to try to reinstall Donald Trump in the White House. In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than native-born Americans, violent crime reportedly continues to fall from its Trump-era heights, and there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime spike.

Fox ran at least 388 weekday segments that featured significant discussion of “migrant crime” from January 1 through March 8, according to a Media Matters review. Only 11 of those segments even hinted at the idea that on the whole most migrants are not criminals (that tally includes segments criticizing politicians or journalists at other networks who made the point).

Fox has designed its coverage to stoke its audience's fears that migrants will endanger their families and spur anger at Biden for purportedly allowing them to do so. The network is flooding the airwaves with reports about individual cases in which Americans have been “brutalized by illegal aliens,” using the anecdotes to conjure up a wave of “migrant crime” purportedly hitting the U.S., and attributing those tragedies to “Biden’s open border,” while dismissing data and arguments to the contrary.