A caravan of migrants is slowly making its way to the US’s southern border, and the anti-immigrant right thinks Americans should be afraid.

The migrants are traveling primarily on foot, fleeing a region wracked by poverty, corruption, and violence. Many are seeking asylum. Numbering somewhere between about four and ten thousand and likely to dwindle before they reach the United States, the group — which is largely comprised of Hondurans — has nonetheless been likened to a flood, an invasion, or even an army. President Trump is considering blocking their entry and has already deployed thousands of troops to the border. Paranoid right-wingers, imaginations running wild, are denouncing what they see as a plot financed by the billionaire George Soros, the Democratic Party writ large, or perhaps even Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela.

For other observers, however, Trump’s reaction only underlines his administration’s appalling immigration record — family separations at the border, heinous treatment of young people in immigration detention centers (including the rape of young women and girls by ICE agents), and other acts of gratuitous cruelty that spur a never-ending stream of headlines — and adds to the urgency of resisting his policies. Civil disobedience acts are proliferating, and a handful of Democratic politicians with national influence are now sympathetic to activists’ calls to abolish ICE.