When Donald Trump addressed the nation on Monday in the wake of two mass shootings less than 24 hours apart, he said, "We must shine light on the dark recesses of the Internet and stop mass murders before they start." His own campaign ads, it turns out, might be a good place to start.

According to the New York Times, the Trump campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook this year using the word "invasion" as part of an effort to make immigration a central issue for the 2020 presidential election. Since March of this year, the campaign has spent $1.25 million on immigration-specific ads, nearly a quarter of the total it's spent on Facebook advertising as a whole. "AMERICA'S SAFETY IS AT RISK," one reads. "LET'S MAKE A STATEMENT TO THE DEMS!" Another reads: "THIS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY. FINISH THE WALL!" And another still: "It's CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION." Many of the ads repeat the words "invasion" and "national emergency," mirroring Trump's descriptions of immigrants as an enemy army—and the El Paso shooter's manifesto claiming "this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."

Since he started campaigning, Trump has made immigration a focus. Days before the 2018 midterms, Trump referred to a migrant caravan at the U.S.-Mexico border in prepared remarks: "It’s like an invasion. They have overrun the Mexico border." He added, "These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country." He didn't let up after the elections. In January, he tweeted, "Humanitarian Crisis at our Southern Border. I just got back and it is a far worse situation than almost anyone would understand, an invasion!" And at a campaign rally this past March, he brought up migrant caravans again, saying, "It is an invasion, you know that? I say, 'invasion,' they say, 'Isn’t that terrible?' I don’t know what these people are thinking." In June, he complained about congressional Democrats holding up border wall construction, saying on Twitter, "What are they thinking as our Country is invaded by so many people (illegals) and things (Drugs) that we do not want. Make America Great Again!"

Even when he's not using that specific word—"invasion"—Trump still talks about immigration as a violent threat to Americans. During his presidential campaign, he compared Syrian refugees to "snakes." and a campaign ad used footage of Syrian migrants traveling en masse in Hungary. In February, he falsely claimed that prior to building a small barrier along the border it shares with Mexico, El Paso "used to have extremely high rates of violent crime—one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities."

There's no evidence these specific Facebook ads influenced the shooter to kill 22 people in El Paso, but avoiding the president's dehumanizing comments about immigrants is extremely difficult. His rhetoric is amplified by other right-wing commentators and outlets, like Fox News, Breitbart, and The Rush Limbaugh Show. Iowa Congressman Steve King, no stranger to racist controversy himself, complained about immigration attorneys giving legal aid to asylum applicants, saying on Fox News in April of last year, "They better have their laws right if they're gonna go to a foreign country and help facilitate an unarmed invasion into the United States." Among the anti-immigrant segments on Fox cataloged by Media Matters, host Laura Ingraham told Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick in July that his state is "completely overrun by this illegal invasion." She added, "Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people."

As Meagan Flynn wrote in a 2018 Washington Post article, describing immigrants as an invasion is "one of the oldest and most persistent anti-immigration metaphors in the country’s history, employed to oppose Irish Catholics, Asians, Latinos, Germans, Jews and just about everyone except white Protestants of English ancestry who now lives in America." No matter where immigrants were coming from, nativists used the same arguments for keeping them out. Catholics from Ireland and Italy would always be loyal to the Pope before the U.S. Jews fleeing Nazi Germany are likely double agents. Refugees from the Vietnam War could secretly be Communist spies, even if they fought on the side of American forces. University of California, Irvine professor and author of The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation Leo R. Chavez told the Post that it's a way of erasing the real reasons why people come to the U.S.—to escape natural disasters and political instability, to pursue better work and economic opportunity—and instead painting them as a single evil entity "bent on destroying our way of life."

Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade defended the president's—and the El Paso shooter's—rhetoric, saying, "If you use the term 'an invasion,' that's not anti-Hispanic. It's a fact."