5 takeaways from NPR's reporting on the purported Matamoros flyer

On April 15, the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project posted a long thread on the social media platform X.

"BREAKING - Flyers distributed at NGO in Mexico encouraging illegals to vote for President Biden," reads the first post. A video shows the flyer hanging in portable toilets at a migrant encampment in Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

The thread quickly racked up more than 9 million views.

"Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open," read the last two lines of the flyer in awkward Spanish.

The logo for Resource Center Matamoros (RCM), a local group serving asylum seekers appears on the flyer, as well as the name of its founder, Gabriela Zavala.

Here are the five takeaways from NPR's reporting on the flyer. For a complete account, read NPR's full story.

1. Zavala denies any connection to the flyer or its message

RCM founder Zavala, a U.S. citizen who lives in Texas, says she didn't write the flyer and her group does not encourage migrants to vote. "I was almost in a state of shock," she said about the moment she saw the Heritage thread. "And I said, 'Wow, you know, this is completely untrue.'" She immediately started receiving threats online.

Whoever made the flyer copied text from RCM's website, which has not been updated in years and has outdated information, such as a defunct phone number, that also appears on the flyer.

The first two sentences of the flyer appear to be an old description of RCM copied from the website, which is in English, and run through Google Translate.

The next sentences that discuss voting for Biden are written in a different style and have grammatical errors.

2. The group