


When senators tried to power through an amnesty for illegal immigrants in 2007, the bill was met with an avalanche of phone calls and faxes from angry voters who helped doom the measure to defeat.
The Senate’s internet server shut down at one point, and on the day of the vote, the phone system overloaded. NumbersUSA, a grassroots pressure group, said it alone accounted for 1.5 million faxes during the weeks of debate.
Fast-forward to today. Congressional offices can ignore faxes, delete emails and send callers straight to voicemail. The one place they can’t escape constituents is on social media, and that’s just where a new immigration pressure group plans to hound them.
The Immigration Accountability Project, founded last year by two veterans from NumbersUSA, says it wants to help constituents slip into lawmakers’ feeds with posts demanding a get-tough approach to border security, and to arm voters for in-person conversations with lawmakers at grocery stores and town halls.
“One thing they can’t turn off is they can’t turn off their social media. So we hold members of Congress accountable by really targeting their social media handles,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the IAP.
The IAP had its first major battle this month, taking to social media with leaked details of the Senate negotiations over a border security deal. The results were a firestorm online and a wave of anger among House Republicans who vowed to reject the deal if it looked like what the IAP said.
The Republican negotiators complained that the information was wrong, but they didn’t provide countering details, only fueling the anger, particularly against GOP Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma. Some of his constituents took to his social media account to demand answers, and it turned into a crescendo of criticism, with commentators riled up over what they saw as his betrayal.
Rosemary Jenks, the IAP’s director of government relations, said that’s exactly how the group hoped things would go.
“We are basically letting all the public know on social media what a member of Congress is doing behind closed doors and letting them react to that member of Congress,” she said. “This is the epitome of holding someone accountable for his actions.”
On the other side of the immigration battle, activists are fighting back, holding rallies, organizing internet campaigns and urging phone calls to lawmakers’ offices to try to block the GOP from imposing new asylum limits or restricting the president’s catch-and-release powers.
The competing approaches raise questions about what sort of pressure points can work to shape Congress.
Experts say the contours of pressure have changed as the internet rewrites the rules on how members of Congress interact with constituents and how the groups that seek to shape them turn into powerful political voices.
Letters and telegrams, which were standard, required some investment of effort and at least a postage stamp, suggesting the sender was invested in a position. Then came faxes and emails, which came with much less effort but brought far more participation.
Social media is different. The investment of effort can be low, but the engagement is huge. Unlike a letter to Capitol Hill, which gets seen by only a low-level staffer, a social media post — or reply to a senator’s post — can be seen by thousands and can help shape how others see the news.
Brad Fitch, CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, which has studied voter-Congress interactions, said Capitol Hill is still eager to listen to voters but now must work hard to identify those who are constituents.
“Our research is very clear. If they’re just sending Twitter messages without any local address it’s virtually worthless,” he said.
The CMF figures that about 50 million email messages go to the House and Senate every year, primarily generated by third-party groups trying to build momentum for their stance. Form emails have “virtually no impact,” the foundation said, while those that are individualized end up in the more influential pile.
Congressional offices tell The Washington Times that they still try to evaluate electronic communications. They have computer programs that log them and tally the fors and againsts. Staffers can then look at specific messages to understand the appeals.
Offices also take note of when their phones start blowing up on an issue, which signifies a more intense level of engagement.
Social media can be tricky, particularly on platforms like X, where it may be tough to figure out if it’s a real person or an automated bot behind the account.
Mr. Fitch said there’s also a difference in how offices approach feedback on issues. A spate of calls and emails about a community project can swing the needle, but the CMF’s research shows pressure campaigns on abortion, guns and immigration are trickier because lawmakers are already so ideologically seated on those issues.
“Immigration is a hot-button issue, and most of our research shows that members of Congress on ideological issues, that have had positions held for years … it’s very, very hard to turn a no to a yes,” Mr. Fitch said.
Ms. Jenks, who was part of NumbersUSA’s 2007 fax tsunami that helped derail the immigration bill, said the faxes crucially showed where voters stood. Offices could stack the pros and cons and compare the levels of support.
Social media, she said, can replicate that, with a public record of how people are lining up on an issue.
“Our goal is to hold individual members of Congress accountable,” she said. “Social media is the way we educate voters, so we need to tell the voters what their member of Congress is doing that they either like or don’t like, so those voters can express their views.”
The IAP has two former members of Congress on its board, Colorados’ Tom Tancredo and Virginia’s Dave Brat, who said the group is tapping into a key pressure point, cutting through social media noise to focus voters’ feelings.
“The job of this group will be to cut through that and get real citizen involvement in every congressional district to tell the congressmen and women this is real,” Mr. Brat said.
He has been through the immigration battles himself.
It was one of the key issues he used in his shock primary victory in 2014 over Eric Cantor, who was the No. 2 Republican in the House with a path to becoming a future House speaker.
Mr. Brat said the border right now is a “70% issue” among Americans.
Part of the challenge for the group is calibrating the pressure to where each target lawmaker is.
Some are more active on Facebook. Others seem to prefer X or gravitate toward Instagram.
The IAP has applied to be a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.