The Law-and-Order Influencer

Turning Point USA’s Savanah Hernandez on her journalistic position.

This past October, while visiting New York City, Savanah Hernandez, a correspondent for Turning Point USA, spotted street vendors selling handbags on Canal Street—a common sight. Hernandez—who is twenty-nine, wears black-framed glasses, and identifies herself on X as a “Proud American”—is a rising star at Turning Point, an advocacy organization originally founded by Charlie Kirk to promote right-wing activism on college campuses that has since grown into a prominent media platform. In a hundred-and-one-second video that Hernandez posted on her personal X account, where she has more than seven hundred thousand followers, she pans and zooms at a rapid clip while declaring the scene the “craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” In her caption, she tagged the X page for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and wrote “Perhaps @ICEgov should go check this corner out.”

Two days later, ICE agents raided Canal Street. In a press release, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, declared that it was “MAKING NEW YORK’S CANAL STREET SAFE AGAIN” and announced the arrests of nine “criminal illegal aliens” and four “violent rioters” who had protested at the scene.