And the final day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a session on transnational news that begins with Niusha Hansel and Linda Jean Kenix. Their study examines news coverage of the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to deport migrants. Some 600,000 undocumented immigrants have (supposedly) been deported during the first year of Trump’s second term, and a total of 2 million have left the US; this has also caused widespread protests, including the No Kings protests across the country.
How has this been reported internationally, across English-speaking countries UK, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Nigeria, and India? Common to these are broadly negative views towards immigration, and Australia, Canada, and the UK have broadly negative views towards the USA by now; this is still very different for India, the Philippines, and Nigeria.
This study examined news coverage since December 2024, which covers several events during the first year of the administration including the illegal arrests and deportations of several US citizens and residents, various protests, and the deployment of the National Guard in several states. Media coverage was especially pronounced in India and the UK, followed at some distance by Canada and Australia; the other countries paid considerably less attention to these developments.
These articles were coded for their coverage approaches; countries differed on which stakeholder groups were featured, how ICE was presented (more negatively in Canada, the UK, and Australia), how protesters were represented (the reverse), whether the central frame was thematic conflict (yes), and more.
There is a strong link here with the perception of immigration in these countries; across all six countries, ICE was not the primary topic, even if it was depicted negatively – politics, protests, and immigration were positioned as the central topics here, and experts or citizens were rarely positioned as key stakeholders. Protesters were depicted positively unless protests turned violent, at which point the depiction of ICE also improved.
Sentiments turned more negative when countries’ own citizens were deported, and – in the case of Canada – also when Trump floated the annexation of Canada as a 51st state. Overall, negative attributes came to correlate with each other too.
