US politicians have explicitly framed Mexican border crossers as terrorists

Evidence

In recently sponsoring legislation to arm civilian militias – “boots on the ground,” as he puts it ominously – to patrol the Texas border with Mexico, Culberson explicitly characterizes illegal border crossers from Mexico as terrorists (or when speaking more carefully as harboring terrorists). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 412

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral-panic framing in Cohen and to the shifting target of racialized threat discourse.