Some years ago, when I was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, one of my conservative readers wrote me an e-mail calling me a “crybaby.” This, by itself, was not remarkable. My in-box filled with right-wing invective whenever I wrote a column that had anything positive to say about a Latino immigrant. I’d been called a lot worse, and threatened with physical violence, too. But this missive also came with a forwarded e-mail that contained a list of ten “facts” about illegal immigration. They had been gleaned, the writer said, from the very pages of the newspaper for which I worked. The list began by declaring, “If this doesn’t open your eyes, nothing will.”

The list portrayed California as a state being overrun by criminal “aliens” who were filling up the state’s prisons and hospitals, draining its public-health funds, and transforming the California economy into an unregulated bazaar of cash-earning “illegals.” But it was a work of fiction, and its “facts” had never appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The author, or authors, had assembled the list from a series of widely inflated statistics (numbers doubled, tripled, and in one case multiplied by a factor of three hundred), along with the conjectures and musings of a conservative writer and a completely fabricated “statistical report on undocumented immigrants” credited to a defunct government agency.

I had great fun debunking the list and feeling morally superior and smarter than the people who had penned and circulated it. Barack Obama was then in the first year of his Presidency, and anti-immigrant rhetoric was on the wane in California. Twitter had fewer than twenty million active users then, and I was not one of them, so I did not tweet a link to my column. Like a lot of writers, I hadn’t joined Twitter because I figured I’d demean myself by reducing my thoughts to a hundred and forty characters. Donald Trump had no such qualms—he’d dispatched his first tweet some months earlier: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!” Twitter now has more than three hundred million users. And, as we all know, Trump eventually rode his Twitter feed to the White House.

In November, as the depth of the Republican Party’s losses in the midterm elections fully sunk in, Trump retweeted a post claiming that “Illegals can get up to $3,874 a month under Federal Assistance program. Our social security checks are on average $1200 a month. RT if you agree: If you weren’t born in the United States, you should receive $0 assistance.” There’s a cottage industry now in the debunking of false facts circulating on the Internet, and very quickly the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and others revealed that the tweet was entirely incorrect: the amount in question referred to payments that had been made to a legally admitted refugee family—in Canada.

The false facts spread by the author of the “open your eyes” e-mail that I received in 2009, the creator of the phony “statistical report,” and the sender of the deceptive “Federal Assistance” tweet slandered an entire group of people—immigrants and the children of immigrants, including “anchor babies,” like me. There are, of course, many precedents for this kind of sustained attempt to create a false narrative about a people: from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a work of anti-Semitic fiction first published in Russia, in the early twentieth century; to the anti-Tutsi radio broadcasts that helped unleash the Rwandan genocide, in 1994.

Today, the forty-fifth President of the United States is making common cause with professional and amateur deceivers as he governs and leads his party via his Twitter feed. Each false tweet and retweet deepens the menacing image of Latino immigrants and their progeny in the minds of his followers. As the tweets tell it, we are at once a slothful and conniving people, producing more children than we can feed while draining the public treasury and spreading disease and poisoning good Americans with illicit drugs.

I read this hate and I think of the millions of people being slandered by the lies. I remember being eight years old, growing up in Los Angeles, watching as my parents, both immigrants from Guatemala, went to work each day. My father left at sunset to work a night shift as a valet, after spending the day in adult classes to earn his high-school-equivalency diploma. In the morning, my mother, her heels click-clacking, headed out to her jobs; she worked first as a cashier and later as a clerk typist. I’ve lived an entire American life in the presence of the Latino work ethic, and as a reporter and an author I’ve found it in the many corners of the United States that I have visited, from roadside restaurants in Sweet Home, Oregon, to Cinco de Mayo celebrations in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My father, a man whose mother was illiterate, was rewarded for his labors with U.S. citizenship; he became a California epicure, listening to Beethoven, reading Roman history, and taking his son to see the wonders of many civilizations on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Generations of Latino immigrants have gone to work with an abiding faith that, if they labor hard enough, they will earn their place here. They lift up the beams of new houses and office buildings, care for the children of strangers, keep restaurant kitchens spick-and-span, and harvest crops in sun and in rain. But, in the first decades of this century, they face a new reality: the prospect that no amount of brawn or sacrifice will grant them the prize that they most desire. Their labor has become a Sisyphean spectacle unfolding in the very homes and communities they have built and kept prosperous.

The New York Times revealed last week that the President of the United States employs an indocumentada at his golf club in New Jersey. Victorina Morales is, like my parents, a native of Guatemala. She’s cleaned Trump’s bathroom, dusted his golf trophies, and made his bed. A Trump Organization employee, aware of her status, arranges to drive Morales to work, because she’s ineligible for a driver’s license. Her story is a domestic melodrama with a political twist—a maid working for the very man who is persecuting her people—and if we had a Victor Hugo among us he’d transform her into a character in a novel like “Les Misérables.” The musical version might end with a rousing song, the lyrics speaking a message similar to the words that Morales spoke to the Times: “We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money. We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”

If the recent midterm elections are any guide, Trump will continue to resort to humiliating Latin American immigrants as his political fortunes wane and his legal problems mount. With the G.O.P. majority in Congress under threat, he called a caravan of Central American asylum-seekers passing through Mexico an “invasion,” suggested that MS-13 gang members and Middle Eastern terrorists were rife in their ranks, and sent the military to keep them from pushing their strollers across the border in search of safety. On Tuesday, meeting in the Oval Office with Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi, to discuss the government budget and the border wall, Trump repeated another statement of dubious provenance: that the government had recently detained ten terrorists crossing the Mexican border.