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Kathryn Gamble

DES MOINES — The grocery store had been her American Dream, but now Norah Innis wondered if she’d be better off bolting the doors and moving back to Liberia.

Sales were down. Rent was harder to pay. And campaign ads dominating Iowa’s screens and airwaves ahead of the first Republican showdown of 2024 seemed to paint immigrants like her as the enemy.

She worried the rhetoric could fuel violence.

“It scares me,” said Innis, 60, tying plastic bags of peanuts in her shop catering to West African transplants, the Celebrity International Store. “It scares me a lot.”

As the race for the White House officially kicks off and GOP contenders jostle for votes before next week’s Iowa caucuses, people who’ve settled here from all over the world say the intensifying spotlight on border security and caustic language lobbed by Republican candidates has filled them with dread.

The fire hose of campaign vitriol targeting “undocumented” or “illegal” migrants crushes room for nuanced debate, some say, threatening to demonize anyone who looks foreign. Naturalized citizens fear their neighbors might lump them in the same category as “criminals” and “terrorists,” and even those who agree with cracking down on unauthorized entry are disturbed by the relentless condemnation of people they see as fleeing danger or seeking a better life.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Republican front-runner <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> said at an event in New Hampshire last month, doubling down on phrasing his critics have slammed as strikingly similar to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/18/poisoning-blood-trumps-ugliest-moments-immigrants/" target="_blank">Adolf Hitler’s talking points</a>.

“They poison — mental institutions and prisons all over the world,” the former president continued. “Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia.”

His competitors, aiming to lure voters in a Trump-loving party, have largely shied away from addressing his word choice.

Since the start of December, the three leading Republican candidates and groups backing them have spent nearly $5 million on ads in Iowa bashing what they call too-lax immigration policies, with Trump and his allies hammering the topic hardest by far, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending. The spots feature footage of people crowding at the southern border while voice-overs warn of bloodthirsty assailants, fentanyl dealers and, as one Trump spot put it, “the possibility of a Hamas attack.”

A super PAC supporting <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/nikki-haley-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Nikki Haley</a> declared the former governor of South Carolina would seal the border “before it’s too late.” Another group favoring Florida Gov. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/ron-desantis-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Ron DeSantis</a> aired a clip of the candidate pledging to protect the southern border with lethal force, saying, “We’re going to leave them stone-cold dead.”

The doomsday imagery has irked some leaders in Des Moines, who point out that Iowa’s capital is home to one of the <a href="https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/05/26/des-moines-iowa-immigrant-population-growth-ranked-among-united-states-fastest-heartland-forward/7437283002/" target="_blank">fastest-growing</a> immigrant populations in the nation. That pool of talent fills critical jobs that would otherwise sit open, said Robert Brownell, a Republican serving his sixth term on the Polk County Board of Supervisors, yet such context is lost in the political cacophony.

“You can’t call for a moderate policy,” he said — like streamlining work visas for asylum seekers — “without being accused of favoring ‘unfettered immigration’ or ‘letting every criminal come in.’”

Innis, the Liberian shopkeeper, had been trying to ignore what she viewed as political negativity, focusing more on her customers looking for homemade pepper sauce or a wax-print dress imported from Ghana.

Her son, however, followed the media blitz with apprehension. Melvin Paye, 45, had been offended when Trump referred to African nations as “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html" target=_blank>s---hole countries</a>” back in 2018. But “poisoning the blood of our country”?

“That turns us against each other,” he said, visiting his mother one early January afternoon as she packaged produce.

People were already angry about inflation, which had shrunk Innis’s profits and stung her son, too, when the cost of rubber jumped and the tire plant where he works slashed his hours. Paye had blamed the war in Ukraine for scrambling supply chains, but he worried Trump’s words were giving people another scapegoat.

“There could be more fighting,” he said. “More situations like January 6th.”

Their family had fled Liberia in 2002 as civil war raged, landing in Des Moines after spending three years in an Ivory Coast refugee camp. Paye sympathized with the migrants in the campaign ads.

“If Liberia bordered the United States,” he said, “we would have done the same thing.”

Now Liberia has a new <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/after-decades-wings-liberias-quiet-man-boakai-set-presidency-2023-11-18/" target=_blank>president-elect</a>, a former school janitor popular among Paye’s friends for his steady demeanor and scandal-free record. Optimism about the future there is contagious.

“That’s why everyone wants to go back,” Innis said.

Not her son, though. He’d pledged allegiance to the United States on the day he became a citizen in 2010. If trouble reached his doorstep, he had a pistol in his safe.

“I’ll stay,” he said, “and defend myself if I have to.”

At home, Gloria Henriquez could switch off the TV.

But at Planet Fitness in suburban Urbandale, sweating off calories on the elliptical, she couldn’t avoid the screens replaying footage of people at the southern border.

“I shake my head every time,” said the 47-year-old owner of Tullpa, a Peruvian restaurant, who was born in El Salvador.

After seeing those campaign spots, she said, she needs to calm down in one of the gym’s massage chairs.

The advertising spree leading up to the Republican caucuses reminded her of a co-worker she’d met shortly after relocating from New York to central Iowa five years ago to care for her sick mother. The man spoke often of his love for Trump and disdain for immigrants. He boasted about traveling to Arizona to volunteer for a vigilante group “guarding” the southern border.

“It was so scary because he looked very inoffensive,” she recalled. Nothing about his appearance suggested he enjoyed hunting for people he viewed as intruders. Those migrants, she thought, were probably looking for what she had sought: peace and opportunity.

Now Henriquez worried that Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comments would inspire more suspicion of outsiders.

“I will use Trump’s own words: He will poison Americans’ mind-sets,” Henriquez said. “They will see an immigrant and say, ‘Oh, they ruin us.’”

Iowa, she said, is her “forever home.” She’ll be voting for the first time in November.

Joshua Lott

The pastor didn’t talk about politics — not directly.

His congregation of mostly refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, many of whom have become U.S. citizens in the last decade, voted right and left. Eugene Kiruhura, 37, wanted to create a haven for everyone at their church in Urbandale.

Lately, though, some worshipers had confided to him that they were stressed about the campaign noise — who could forget the stakes of 2024 when even C-SPAN occupied a nearby billboard? — so Kiruhura had been turning to one of his favorite Bible verses from the Book of Matthew.

“I was a stranger and you invited me in,” he recited as one of those worshipers joined him in his office with a toy basketball hoop on the door.

Samson Irakiza, 31, nodded along. He knew the next lines:

I needed clothes and you clothed me.

I was sick and you looked after me.

The verse guided Irakiza at work for a home health company, where he’d climbed from caring for elderly folks, who were almost always White, to supervising the staffers, who are almost entirely Black immigrants.

Trump’s “poisoning the blood” speeches had startled him. Rebels in his central African home country had tried to kill off his Tutsi ethnic group, deriding them as “cockroaches.” Both Irakiza and the pastor had fled to tent camps across the border in Burundi before making it to Iowa, where hostility flared in other ways.

Recently, Irakiza shared, one of his friends, an UberEats delivery driver, had walked by the house of a White man who shouted: What is that Black guy doing here?

“We all have the same blood,” Irakiza said. “We aren’t poisoning anything.”

“Those words create conflict,” Kiruhura agreed, so they must respond peacefully, he counseled, through their actions.

The church regularly organized opportunities for community service. When the next snowstorm hit, the Congolese immigrants would trek out with shovels, offering to clear the driveways of their aging neighbors.

These good deeds, the pastor hoped, could help eclipse what Iowans were seeing on television.

Overseas Press Club Madeline Dane Ross Award, 2020

International Women’s Media Foundation Fellow, 2017

Frank C. Porter Memorial Award for Labor & Business Reporting, 2017

National Association of Social Workers’ Media Award, 2015

Indiana Society of Professional Journalists: Student Journalist of the Year, 2012

Hearst National Writing Championship, First Place, 2011

Indiana University, BA in journalism

Danielle Paquette is a national correspondent for The Washington Post's America Desk. She previously served as West Africa bureau chief and has reported from more than 20 countries on four continents. 

Danielle Paquette

Northwestern University, BS in Journalism 

Sabrina Rodriguez is a national politics reporter for The Washington Post. She chronicles the evolving demographics in battleground states and the ways candidates, campaigns and interest groups seek to mobilize voter blocs large and small.

Sabrina Rodriguez

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Trump rhetoric, Republican candidates’ ads frighten immigrants in Iowa

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A photo of a woman at the counter of a corner store with the headline: Trump rhetoric and Republican candidates' ads frighten immigrants in Iowa

Kathryn Gamble for The Washington Post

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Trump rhetoric and Republican candidates' ads frighten immigrants in Iowa

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