It tends to start with a violent assault. Then video documentation of the incident quickly circulates online, priming people to see not just an individual crime but a broader story about perceived dangerous outsiders.

So it was on June 8, 2026, when an assailant badly injured a man in an evening knife attack in Belfast. Within hours, a graphic video of the assault was all over social media, and masked rioters had set homes, cars and a bus on fire. Moreover, police said properties believed to belong to immigrants were deliberately targeted after authorities charged a Sudanese asylum-seeker with attempted murder.

As the unrest spread, immigrants and immigration lawyers repeatedly found their addresses and personal information released online, with social media users urging so-called patriots to act.

What played out in Northern Ireland was not a one-off. As a civil rights scholar who studies racial threat narratives and immigration politics, I see the Belfast episode as indicative of a now familiar script. A similar cycle of events occurred in Dublin in 2023 and in Southport in northern England in 2024. In each, a single, shocking crime allegedly involving a foreign-born suspect was quickly reframed into a broader indictment of migrants, asylum-seekers and minorities.

And while these events all played out in the U.K. and Ireland, I would argue that the same basic logic behind the pattern runs through contemporary U.S. immigration rhetoric and policy.

A playbook with repeatable stages

The first stage is the triggering event: a shocking crime, often involving children or a graphic video, that primes people for blaming a group of people.

The second is what I call “categorical expansion.” Instead of treating the suspect as an individual defendant, activists and online networks recast the incident as evidence of criminality among a larger category: immigrants, asylum-seekers or other racialized outsiders. Often this is conveyed through disinformation and social media narratives that depict such people as a security threat.

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