The two men rang the bell at the Resource Center Matamoros, a migrant aid group in the Mexican border city, and, speaking in broken Spanish, said they were looking for volunteer work.
Security footage shared with The New York Times shows the pair standing on the sidewalk in shorts and flip flops as they talked via speakerphone with Gaby Zavala, the center’s founder. After about half an hour, they left.
Ms. Zavala didn’t know it yet, but the men were not volunteers. They were provocateurs building an online following with hidden camera exposés and ambushes that claim to uncover abuse and election fraud in the American immigration system.
Ms. Zavala realized something was off a few hours later, when the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, uploaded images of a flier with her group’s logo to social media, thrusting her organization into the center of a political firestorm.
The flier, written in Spanish and purportedly found hanging in portable toilets in the migrant camp across the street from the center, carried an explosive message to would-be immigrants: “reminder to vote for president Biden when you are in the united states. We need four more years of his administration in order to remain open.”
For many on the right, it was a smoking gun, confirming debunked theories about the left’s schemes to urge immigrants to vote illegally for Democrats. The post, uploaded on April 15, quickly racked up more than nine million views on X and was shared by multiple elected officials, including Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina and former presidential candidate.
The next morning, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, held up an oversized printout of the flier in a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing. “I would call it treason,” Ms. Greene said to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was sitting before the committee.
Ms. Zavala calls the document a crude fake, and part of a plot to propel false, anti-immigration narratives in an election year. The phone number listed on the flier is out of date, she noted. Some of the language is lifted directly from her group’s English language website, but appears to be translated by software.
But perhaps the strongest evidence, she said, was the presence of Anthony and Joshua Rubin, brothers from Long Island known online as the Muckrakers, at the building earlier that same day, trying to gain access under false pretenses.
Mr. Secretary, the oversight project released a bombshell report last night on your connection to the dark money NGO industrial complex of illegal immigration. I know you saw this from one of my colleagues just earlier. They found flyers throughout the Resource Center Matamoros refugee camp in Mexico telling illegal aliens, “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” Eyewitnesses saw the flyers also being handed out to migrants who were using R.C.M. for assistance in coming to the United States. This is corruption at the deepest level. As a matter of fact, I would call it treason.
“I would never encourage immigrants to vote, because they can’t,” said Ms. Zavala, 41, who started the organization in 2019 and manages it from Texas. No one contacted her to verify the document before it was posted, she said, and she has since received some 50 death threats and racist emails. “I feel violated.”
In an interview with The Times, Anthony Rubin acknowledged that he and his brother falsely identified themselves as volunteers that day. But he said they did not plant the flier. Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation that first posted the document on X, said he stood behind their claims.
“Nothing that we put online has been proven in the least bit inaccurate,” he said.
The Oversight Project is something of a departure for the once-wonkish think tank. The project’s website describes its mission as “innovative investigations utilizing cutting-edge resources and contacts” in order to drive “accountability of the destructive work of the radical, progressive Left.” Mr. Howell, who calls himself a “deportation scientist” on X, said his group had worked closely with the Rubin brothers before….