Are Your Pets Safe? The Strange Disappearance of an Anti-Migrant Conspiracy Theory

In 2022, I was working as the news editor of the Dallas Observer during the height of controversy surrounding Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a state-led border crackdown. The Republican governor was using every opportunity he could get his hands on — appearances on Fox News, press releases, and incessant Twitter posts — to champion the operation’s supposed successes, and right-wing media was glad to chip in. Bizarre articles about migrants began to crop up online, and in one of them, there was the claim that migrants kill and eat Americans’ pets. It has since had a long shelf life.

Since Joe Biden had come to office in January 2021, Texas Republicans had gone all in on border hysteria and ramping up then former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant playbook. Meanwhile, Fox News dispatched reporters to Eagle Pass, a Texas border town, to report on the immigration fallout.

One reporter came back with a grim story: Fox titled it “Migrants killing dogs, stealing from homes prompts some Texas border town residents to arm themselves.” The reporter interviewed at least one woman on video who issued the claims, and when I later emailed him about his sourcing, he insisted that “several residents” had told him the same thing: Migrants were murdering Texans’ pets. By way of evidence, he curtly suggested I read the very article whose sourcing I was questioning.

In the piece, a woman called Cindy, whose last name wasn’t provided, explained that the immigrants "are like robbing stuff or killing animals to eat." She didn’t provide specifics, and the reporter apparently didn’t hunt any details down.

You might have guessed it already, but there was a problem with the dark claim at the heart of this story: Both the county sheriff’s office and the Eagle Pass Police Department told me they didn’t have a single complaint that involved a migrant killing a pet, let alone eating one. The Maverick County Sheriff’s Department had a single recent report of an “unknown male” who allegedly stabbed a dog, but the report didn’t describe the man as a migrant.

That was in September 2022, exactly two years before Trump and vice president-to-be JD Vance aired similarly disturbing claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Missouri. The state’s Republican governor, the mayor, and law enforcement said there was no credible basis to the claim, but the Trump campaign repeated it several times over the next two months.

Immigration Crackdown

Since January, the Trump administration has followed through with its vow to make a harsh immigration crackdown a centerpiece of its policy agenda. The government has rounded up immigrants, both documented and not, and arrested foreign students who were legally in the country. Hundreds have been shipped to a prison with a worrisome history of torture in El Salvador. Some US citizens, including a two-year-old child, have been deported. The administration, too, has violated court orders related to immigration and deportation.

Controversy or not, early polls suggested that a majority of Americans supported many parts of the Trump administration’s immigration clampdown. In February, the Pew Research Center found that nearly six in 10 Americans polled backed the president’s efforts to deport more undocumented people, while 58% thought sending more US military to the southern border was a good idea.

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Trump, meanwhile, has also spoken of deporting “homegrowns,” meaning US citizens, to El Salvador. Most recently, the administration tried to deport non-Libyan immigrants to Libya, a country where refugees and migrants have been sold at slave auctions.

At the same time, the White House has insisted that “criminals” are its main target for deportation, but a recent NBC analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data found that more than half of those in custody have no criminal records or convictions.

Are the Pets OK Now?

All that said, something has changed: Claims that immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets have more or less disappeared. After September 2024, articles about the conspiracy theory began to taper off, and since Trump came back to office, immigration-related news has centered around the flurry of policies the administration has undertaken.

Still, it’s worth noting that back in September, when Trump and Vance were still insisting that Haitians were eating pets, the Cato Institute published an analysis of Texas crime data that offered some important insight on the conspiracy theory. Texas was the only state that collected criminal data based on immigration status.

In 2022, native-born US citizens accounted for 82% of the state’s population — and they made up at least 93% of convictions for cruelty against animals. Documented immigrants, around 10% of Texas’s population, were convicted in just over 5% of cases of cruelty against animals, while undocumented people were involved in just 2.3% of such convictions.

When the then Republican candidate made the false claim about Haitians, he was tapping into a long history of right-wing conspiracy theories that depict foreign-born people as guilty of the worst kinds of crimes. In the 1980s, for instance, similar claims were made about Asian refugees in Utah, California, and Virginia, among other states. And they were just as false.

Trump has never backtracked on his Haitian pet-eating claims, and if you go check the September 2022 Fox News article about the supposed spate of pet murders in South Texas, there isn’t a correction, editor’s note, or clarification to be found.

Sure, sure, pointing out the lack of evidence for even the most gruesome and obviously fabricated conspiracy theories won’t get you very far nowadays. But the next time such chilling claims make front-page news, you might want to recall the rapid rise and even quicker disappearance of the pet-eating claims in South Texas and Springfield, Missouri.

Dotted Line is written by Inkstick Media managing editor Patrick Strickland. If you have tips, email Patrick at pstrickland (at) inkstickmedia (dot) com.