On Friday, Donald Trump tweeted the headline to a recent Washington Examiner story, which read: “Border rancher: ‘We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.’” As the headline suggests, the story is about a New Mexico rancher who claims to have seen prayer rugs—typically used by observers of Islam—near the U.S.-Mexico border. After the headline, Trump added this: “People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.”

His decision to amplify the Examiner piece has since come under scrutiny. Why? Because the prayer-rug story sounds an awful lot like something that happens in Sicario: Day of the Soldado, as several people have pointed out on Twitter.

The 2018 action film, which revolves around the drug war along the border, opens with border agents chasing after a group of migrants—one of whom turns out to be a Muslim suicide bomber. He kneels, prays, then detonates his bomb. After that, agents come across abandoned prayer rugs along the border; in the next scene, three suicide bombers walk into a store in Kansas City and kill innocent civilians.

The rancher quoted in the Examiner piece does not give her name, or provide photos or evidence of any sort regarding the prayer rugs she allegedly saw. “So I obviously don’t have any proof of it,” she states in a video interview that does not show her face. She does, however, say that she has had conversations with “agents” who have told her that the number of immigrants from countries besides Mexico has “drastically” increased. According to the Examiner piece, the residents in her remote town do not have a local police department; they rely, instead, on the county sheriff’s department and U.S. Border Patrol. The rancher says that she has encountered Guatemalan and Honduran migrants, but “I’ve never seen any Middle Easterners.”

This tweet is not the first time Trump has apparently echoed plot points in the Sicario franchise while ostensibly speaking about real events at the U.S.-Mexico border. The president has also claimed that women are being taped up and trafficked via the southern border, a reality that has been disputed by immigration and human-trafficking experts. “I think his statements are completely divorced from reality,” said Ashley Huebner, associate director of legal services at the National Immigrant Justice Center, in an interview with The Washington Post. “That’s not a fact pattern that we see.” Other experts told the Post that it is possible women are being taped up and trafficked, and that they could not speak to information the president might have received from law-enforcement officials; that said, they agreed, this is not a frequent occurrence, as he seems to allege it is.

However . . . what Trump describes is, once again, a plot point in the Sicario franchise. Could it be, then, that real governmental talking points are being lifted from movies, so that Trump can find new reasons to justify his proposed, costly border wall? Vanity Fair has reached out to the White House for comment.

Either way, one thing is clear: in the midst of all this talk, the longest government shutdown in history is still ongoing.

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