Listen to President Donald Trump long enough, and you’re likely to hear his xenophobic views about immigrants.

In his speeches, Trump regularly states or implies that undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers are a violent criminal threat to innocent native-born Americans and their way of life. In Trump’s own words, migrants are “poisoning the blood,” and he has said that Mexico is sending rapists and drug dealers to the United States.

Just this April, Trump claimed without evidence that “illegal aliens” have been “one of the leading causes of sexual violence over the last four years.”

To be clear, Trump’s fear-mongering does not line up with reality.

Numerous studies have found that immigrants and asylum-seekers are, in fact, far less likely to commit crimes than native-born American citizens. The real drug smugglers crossing U.S. borders are more likely to be U.S. citizens. One NPR report citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data found that “virtually none” of illicit fentanyl is seized from migrants seeking asylum; instead, more than half of fentanyl couriers were U.S. citizens, and almost all of them were legally authorized to cross the border.

But you wouldn’t know that from Trump’s words. And this language against immigrants is not just adversarial ― it is dehumanizing.

One Purdue University study compared how often U.S. presidential candidates made dehumanizing comments toward immigrants, refugees, gangs and asylum-seekers in speeches during the 2008, 2012 and 2016 U.S. election cycles. While all other candidates combined made a total of eight dehumanizing comments, Trump made 464 comments.

Two of Trump’s most common tactics for dehumanizing immigrants are using nonhuman language to describe their actions and assigning “criminality and viciousness” to immigrants, the study found.

James McCann, a professor of political science at Purdue University who was an adviser for the study, told HuffPost that Trump is not an originator for a lot of these dehumanizing immigration analogies — they have existed long before Trump. But the president can accelerate the distribution of these ideas.

“Trump, because of his stature in American politics, he can be an accelerant for that kind of rhetoric, but he certainly is not inventing anything,” McCann said. “No matter what your status in life ... if somebody in political authority is saying, ’Oh, you need to be really scared’ ... The fear mongering, I think, can be very potent.“

And there’s one word in particular that Trump commonly uses ― with dangerous, real-world impacts.

Why The Violent Metaphor Of An ‘Invasion’ Can Be So Dangerous

Trump commonly states that the U.S. is facing an “invasion” of people arriving in the country illegally. And this rhetoric is having real-world impacts on how people negatively view immigrants or anyone perceived to be one.

Trump’s political speech has even been connected to violent acts of hate. The white supremacist who killed 23 people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019 said he did so because he was defending his country against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” according to his online confession.

This March, the gunman’s lawyer said his client believed he was following Trump’s orders and was inspired by Trump’s warnings of an “invasion,” the same word that the president continues to assign to migrants to this day.

“He thought he had to stop the ‘invasion’ because that’s what his president was telling him,” the gunman’s lawyer said in an interview with El Paso Matters. “When [Trump] makes a statement like that, he should be very careful of how it’s going to be received, not only by those of us that are rational, but by those of us that are not, that think that this is a message from the president.“

Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, said the El Paso shooter’s beliefs are an example of how dehumanizing language toward immigrants can have “horrible consequences for communities and people’s lives.”

“Because we have an ‘invasion,’ we have to remove people. Because we have an ‘invasion,’ we have to end birthright citizenship,” Cárdenas said, referring to Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally ― which has, so far, been blocked by federal judges.

“So this idea that people are here to ‘invade’ us again, I think it’s a very intentional use of that word to create anger and rejection and hate,” Cárdenas continued.

And Trump’s immigration views are not an outlier, as his harshest agenda item is among his most popular. A March CBS News/YouGov poll found that most — 53% — Americans said they approve of how Trump is handling immigration and are in favor of Trump’s plans to deport unauthorized immigrants.

Cárdenas said it’s not a surprise that many people believe what Trump is saying because “he and his associates are driving this narrative constantly throughout the country, throughout their whole news channels, TV, radio, on social.”

The language of “invasion” also has legal consequences and is being used by the Trump administration to justify executive wartime authority.

In March, Trump claimed that the U.S. is being invaded by a Venezuelan gang as his reasoning for invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which grants his office the power to speed up his mass deportation program. (The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Trump administration can use this 1798 law, but it must give the Venezuelans it claims are gang members the chance to legally fight their deportation.)

Even beyond the language of an “invasion,” the Trump administration is changing the language used to describe undocumented immigrants in America.

During Joe Biden’s administration, immigration enforcement agencies were ordered to drop the term “illegal alien” and use “noncitizen” instead as a more dignified and respectful way to define the people its staff interacted with. But in Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security is ending the use of “undocumented noncitizen” from its vocabulary in favor of the word “alien” once more.

This return of “alien” terminology matters, too. “When you think of an alien, one thinks of something that’s from outer space, that’s not like you, that’s not a person,” Cárdenas said.

McCann said people saying “the illegals” over “unauthorized immigrants” is the most mainstream example of dehumanization he sees people use “without being reflective” of how this language simplifies three-dimensional people into stereotypes.

Ultimately, one of the main reasons language matters so much from top officials in government is because it sets the tone of what’s acceptable for the rest of us. And right now, Cárdenas said, the Trump administration is sending a message that it is OK to treat immigrants and asylum seekers as less than human because they are not.

“It’s very evident that this administration is intent on dehumanizing immigrants in every way to justify the policies that they’re implementing,” Cárdenas said.