In 2024, one of the most influential anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, the Family Research Council (FRC), focused its animus on immigrants, pushing what were once considered fringe, racist beliefs into mainstream political narratives. Not surprisingly, much of the rhetoric and conspiracy theories about immigrants mirrored what was said during the 2024 elections by candidates, social media provocateurs and other hate groups, and veered directly into white supremacist ideology.
The focus on immigration is hardly off-message for an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. The anti-LGBTQ+ movement has a long political history of association with the white supremacist movement, including FRC leader Tony Perkins. He was the campaign manager for a U.S. Senate campaign that contracted with a company that David Duke had a financial interest in at Duke’s suggestion to the campaign; the campaign later tried to hide that it had hired the company, according to an FEC investigation, and denied contemporaneously knowing about Duke’s financial interest to a Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Like people who make up the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants are a threat to FRC’s vision for an America that is Christian, white and patriarchal.
FRC’s 2024 immigration focus
Researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center reviewed archives for The Washington Stand, an online publication associated with FRC, and found that the site published nearly 150 articles on immigration topics throughout 2024, including an article arguing that Democrats “import” non-white immigrants. Speakers at FRC’s annual summit, Pray Vote Stand, said that the time may come to “breed them out” when discussing immigrants.
“Actually, immigration is not compassionate. Do you know that the immigration services have lost between 30,000 and 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children that are probably somewhere in the seedy underbellies of the trafficking world of this country?” Katy Faust, head of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Them Before Us, told attendees at Pray Vote Stand in early October 2024.
In her comments, she echoed an assertion that President Donald Trump and others have made regarding missing migrant children; experts told CBS News that the assertion distorts facts.
“We need to shut the border for the sake of children. You need to know more about this than everyone else. And then finally, if all else fails, we need to breed them out. Have more babies and raise them up,” Faust continued.
Faust’s final point is a transparent nod to white-extinction conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” or “white genocide” that have long animated white nationalist, neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups. These paranoid narratives are explicitly white supremacist and present white-majority countries as under attack from a cadre of elites, often Jewish people, who are “replacing” or “genociding” whites through encouraging immigration and declining birth rates.
Different wings of the right have used various terms to expound on their belief that white Christian culture is under threat, including “great replacement,” “birth dearth” and/or “demographic crisis.”
Some in the anti-LGBTQ+ movement have long framed their arguments for institutionalized homophobia and transphobia around anxieties related to perceived demographic displacement. They argue that immigrants, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, pose a potent threat to what they believe to be the real America — that is, one that is Christian, white, patriarchal and sustained through reproduction. The movement’s focus on stoking fears around immigration also mirrors broader trends among the American right. And for the FRC especially, it feeds into the culture war and a decline in what they perceive as heteronormative values.
Merging of anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ activism with fear of demographic displacement
“We’ve lost the culture war … and we are a post-Christian country now,” Andrew Brunson, a pastor, said while on stage with FRC President Tony Perkins during Pray Vote Stand. “And I think we’re going to have to have a shift in our perspective to where we learn how to live as a despised minority [in the United States].”
Changing birth rates is among the cultural shifts that FRC and other related right-wing organizations have pointed to as indicative of this “culture war” loss.
“The crisis in fertility for virtually every developed nation is a kind of condensation or a distillation of other cultural indicators,” Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow and director at the Heritage Foundation, said during a May 2024 panel on religious beliefs and fertility rates.
“Why is this a threat? Well, it’s a threat primarily because it reflects a decline in the stable married families that are the fundamental cell of civilization,” Richards continued. At the same time, he criticized seeing fertility as a “mere abstraction” and stated that “we want children born in a particular context,” seeming to refer to heteronormative families.
FRC, which was one of more than 100 organizations to partner with the Heritage Foundation in shaping Project 2025, and its affiliates have leveled similar criticisms related to birth rates and the decline in Christian culture.
Faust, of Them Before Us, appeared on an episode of FRC’s “Washington Watch” in September and took aim at surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. She said, “The vast majority of those children … are going to lose their life in the baby-making process of big fertility.” In the same segment, she described these practices as “eugenics.”
In July, the Heritage Foundation published an article called “The Birth Dearth Gives Rise to Pro-Natalism” about demographic decline in the U.S., critiquing “girl-boss feminism” and advocating for marriage and children as a Christian calling. The following month, white nationalist Jared Taylor notably echoed similar talking points. In a post for American Renaissance, he decried declining birth rates, writing, “Birthrates decline for many reasons: abortion, feminism, working women, delayed marriage, more individualism and materialism.” He wrote, “People want to marry within their race, and there are fewer potential mates in ‘diverse’ neighborhoods.” Taylor finished his article with a direct reference to the Heritage Foundation piece: “And, yes, it’s a white movement. It may take years, but we’ll be back.”
Immigration and the fear of a plan to ‘erase us’
Perkins and some FRC contributors to The Washington Stand presented mass migration as a deliberate strategy by left-leaning politicians to undermine American sovereignty. In multiple articles and comments throughout 2024, FRC affiliates presented migrant children as a strain on America’s school system, repeated Trump’s claims around “Biden migrant crimes” and wrongly depicted migrants as more prone to crime than U.S.-born citizens.
Throughout 2024, The Washington Stand also published multiple articles promoting misinformation around noncitizen voting in U.S. elections, including accusing Democrats of registering undocumented migrants to vote.
“I was accused when I started saying this a couple of years ago of engaging in some sort of conspiracy theory — but very clearly, they want illegal immigrants to be turned into voters. That’s patently clear,” Suzanne Bowdey wrote, quoting House Speaker Mike Johnson, in an article published May 28, 2024. In September 2024, Bowdey cited Rep. Keith Self’s false claim that Democrats “importing voters” went to the “heart of the [party’s] open border scheme.”
Perkins wrote in another Oct. 21, 2024, Washington Stand article, “The crisis has nothing to do with the dream of a better future for migrant children.” He then went on, “It is about creating an environment of political and cultural chaos — one that benefits those seeking political power and control.”
According to U.S. law, only citizens can vote in federal elections. Data collected on the issue shows that noncitizen voting is very rare and that reported incidents do not add up enough to have an impact on elections. And as National Public Radio reported, claims of noncitizens voting appeared to evaporate after Trump won the election, despite months of the right-wing ecosystem drumming up fears around this issue.
The Washington Stand also ran multiple articles targeting Haitian migrants in Ohio and Pennsylvania after right-wing media outlets and politicians, including then-presidential and vice presidential candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian migrants eating pets.
In one article on bomb threats targeting Springfield, Ohio-area schools, The Washington Stand authors S.A. McCarthy and Suzanne Bowdey cited Douglass Mackey, a radical-right activist who was convicted of interfering in the 2016 election through posts he made under the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn.” The article includes a link to one of Mackey’s posts on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, which McCarthy and Bowdey describe as evidence “that struggling businesses in the area may be giving immigrants preference for jobs over Americans.”
The authors do not mention Mackey’s history with the racist white nationalist movement and instead describe him as someone “who had been targeted and jailed by the Biden-Harris administration for sharing political memes.”
Some neo-Nazis took the opportunity presented by the elevated role of white nationalism in the broader far right and of anti-immigrant messaging in the political campaigns to be even more explicitly racist. Goyim Defense League founder Jon Minadeo II said in a 2024 appearance on Red Ice TV: “It’s an invasion disguised as immigration. All this stuff with economics, politics — it’s all a distraction to keep us away from being racially conscious. That’s what it boils down to. Everything just goes back to race.”
In the same segment, he described immigration as part of a broader “plan to erase us,” referring to white, U.S.-born citizens.
As 2024 grinded forward, FRC’s rhetoric reached levels of hyperbolic misinformation and disinformation more often associated with right-wing social media personalities who foment outrage to drive clicks.
For example, anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Chaya Raichik, who founded the popular social media account Libs of TikTok, was a prominent voice pushing great replacement-style conspiracy theories during the year. In January 2024, Libs of TikTok tweeted about levels of migrants encountered at the border in September 2023 versus the levels of births that month, which was lower, claiming, “More illegals entered our country than children being born. They’re quite literally replacing us. This is a feature, not a bug.”
Raichik doubled down on this rhetoric a month later during an interview with journalist Taylor Lorenz. When asked about subscribing to “great replacement” ideas, Raichik responded, “I just look at the facts and the numbers.” She added elsewhere in the interview: “They’re importing people who want to destroy America and who want to — who come here and do not stand for what America stands for. I think, and we see it, there’s time after time after time after time, they come in, they’re destroying our cities, they bring crime with them, and they are bringing them in to replace us.”
Similarly, failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer took to X to promote an episode of her docuseries The Great Replacement. She opined that “Western European Christian culture defined the American ethos for over two centuries. … The politicians and the media have told us that mass migration and diversity would enrich our country and make us stronger. But, it was all a lie. Unfettered third-world immigration has brought nothing but chaos, violence, and despair into our once great nation, and it has ushered in the end of America as we know it.”
These arguments of the U.S. being overrun with illegal immigrants who are engaged in deadly criminal activity was reflected in The Washington Stand’s coverage of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old student who was murdered in Athens, Georgia.
Much like how hate and extremist groups mischaracterize crime statistics and co-opt tragedies to claim Black and Brown people disproportionately commit violent crimes, many of which allegedly target white women, FRC leapt on Riley’s tragic death because the man responsible was an undocumented immigrant.
Discussing Riley’s death in FRC’s The Washington Stand, Suzanne Bowdey claimed that American communities are “overrun” with immigrants and that “crime by illegal immigrants is skyrocketing.” “We are absorbing all of the world’s violent and terror factions,” she said, suggesting that Riley would not have been killed if President Joe Biden had continued hardline anti-immigration policies that began under Trump.
Racist assumptions about criminality and immorality inform both anti-immigrant and anti-Black extremism. Unfounded fears of Black incivility, criminality and sexual immorality in the past were used to justify enslavement and white Christian control over Black bodies and relationships, and the same ideologies were adapted to justify draconian immigration laws.
The explicit adoption of white nationalist, anti-Black talking points and narratives from various corners of the hard right in the form of stoking fear of “demographic replacement” or “white genocide” was illustrative of the extreme nature of the situation facing the country in 2024 and a potential harbinger of more to come if an organized and active civil rights movement does not respond boldly.
Anti-immigration may have won the day, but FRC came up short
Despite going all in on anti-immigrant rhetoric and conspiracies that permeated the 2024 election year, FRC may not have received the rewards it was seeking from Trump.
In July, after the Republican National Committee adopted a platform that omitted language calling for a nationwide abortion ban, Perkins lambasted the document as part of a “choreographed process” that was “unbecoming” of the party, then led a petition drive demanding changes to reflect anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policy preferences.
Illustrations by Ben Jones.