The anti-immigrant movement merged with anti-Latino sentiment under the guise of border security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Gallego said. In response, Latinos have felt compelled to engage politically to combat the wave of misperception and xenophobia.

“What you started seeing is coded language – especially in Arizona –where people were talking about ‘well, I’m not against Latinos, I’m against illegal immigrants,’ but basically using that term to cast everybody the same,” he said. “I think there’s no difference anymore, and they’re wrapped in the same, which is why you’re also seeing Latinos now more strongly standing up for immigrant rights.”

Anti-Latino and immigrant hate has more recently been exacerbated by national legislation and rhetoric heard after the 2016 election, Gallego said.

“I remember growing up hearing anti-Latino slurs being thrown at me as a Latino – being called derogatory terms throughout high school,” Gallego said. “I certainly saw more rhetoric thrown at me as a Latino elected after 2010 because once the politicians started talking in these terms, and some of them became even more and more pejorative and racist … a lot more people felt that it was OK and acceptable to engage in that in public.”

Nationwide, a 2018 report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism in San Bernardino, California, found that anti-Latino hate crimes in America’s largest cities increased by 176 percent in the first two weeks after the 2016 election.

But politics from well before the Trump administration have done just as much to exacerbate the problem, said Gallego, who in the past has received death threats from white supremacists while trying to fight anti-immigration legislation when he served in the Arizona Legislature.

“I had death threats — personalized notes — left at my doorstep by white supremacists when I was at the statehouse because I was fighting to stop some crazy bills that were going to really affect immigrant communities,” he said.

Specifically, he pointed to the Arizona Senate Bill 1070 as a turning point in the anti-immigration movement. The bill allowed for law enforcement officials on the city, county or state level to inquire about citizens’ immigration status if they have “reasonable suspicion” to do so, according to the Arizona Legislature.

“With the culmination of SB 1070 happening, we basically tried to allow racial profiling of Latinos based on this idea of trying to curtail quote-unquote illegal immigration,” he said. “By 2010, there were Latino families in Arizona that were being told to go back to their country, to go back to Mexico – these are people that have lived in Arizona for generations.”

Anti-immigrant hate is due, in part, to massive influxes of immigrants in the 20th century and white backlash, according to Janice Iwama, an assistant law professor at American University. Between 1990 and 2015, the immigrant population more than doubled from 19.7 million to nearly 43.2 million living in the United States.

Gallego said there has been a decades-long political conflict over immigration in Congress and he doesn’t see any work toward a resolution in the near future.

“The rhetoric that comes from the White House – it’s not really challenged by the Republican leadership in the House,” he said.

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Hate crimes have increased since the November 2016 election, according to reports from the FBI.

Thirty-eight fellows are spending this summer examining nearly every aspect of hate for this year’s Carnegie-Knight News21 investigative journalism project titled “Hate in America.” The team is partnering and working with ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, which collects, researches and reports incidents.

The fellows, top students from journalism programs across the U.S. as well as Canada and Ireland, are reporting on racial and religious-based hate and taking a deeper dive into hate perpetrated online, on college campuses or against Native Americans and those in the LBGTQ community.

Fellows also are looking into hate crime laws in every state and analyzing public perception and tolerance of certain races and religions over time through data.

The newsroom is based in Phoenix, at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, but fellows will be on the road this summer, reporting across the U.S. They are talking to those who have experienced, witnessed, perpetrated and reported hate.

Veteran journalists Len Downie Jr. and Jacquee Petchel, the top editors for News21, selected this year’s topic, Hate in America, saying it was both important and timely.

“Much of the coverage of this subject has been localized or has been focused on one aspect of racism or prejudice,” said Downie, the former executive editor of The Washington Post.

“What we’re trying to do is something that’s national — both national in scope and national geographically — and encompassing the project as a whole,” Downie said.

The political atmosphere also makes Hate in America a timely topic, said Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and executive editor of News21.

“We went in this direction because there was so much controversy and turmoil among politicians, voters, advocacy groups about the tenor of the recent election,” Petchel said. “There were aspects of the election that polarized people who are extremely to the right or people who are extremely to the left.”

While the on-the-ground reporting takes place this summer, the project has been in the making for almost a year. Downie and Petchel chose the topic last fall. Fellows began their research and reporting in January, meeting weekly during the spring academic semester with Petchel, a professor at the Cronkite School, and Downie, the Cronkite School’s Weil Family Professor of Journalism.

News21, which launched in 2005, has won numerous awards in journalism competitions.

Downie said he and Petchel look for topics “where our investigative reporting is likely to bring up something new — original, enterprising investigative reporting by News21.”

Last year’s News21 investigative project was the safety of drinking water, in part because of problems with clean water in Flint, Michigan. Previous projects have looked at guns, food safety, voting rights and veterans’ issues.

“We’re always trying to shed light on a topical subject, in which there is more than one view on it,” Downie said.

Downie also sees News21 as having an advantage that many news organizations don’t have today.

“News21 can have somewhere between 20 and 40 reporters working on an investigative project in a concentrated effort,” he said.

Individual fellows are supported by their universities as well as by participating news organizations and philanthropists.

The fellows’ work on “Hate in America” will be published at hateinamerica.news21.com at the end of the summer, and by dozens of news organizations.

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