Do politically charged terms with similar referents, like "undocumented immigrants" (UI) "illegal aliens" (IA) differ only in who uses them, or also in what they mean? We investigate usage patterns by projecting contextual embeddings into interpretable psycholinguistic feature space, and extracting narrative scenes with LLMs. We find that in partisan news, the term IA appears in contexts emphasizing causation and fear. UI appears in contexts emphasizing consequences experienced and shared humanity. Scene abstraction reveals parallel patterns: IA is embedded in narratives of criminality and threat, UI in narratives of vulnerability and governance. Beyond indexing speaker identity, these terms impart different construals on migrants: as agents of harm versus patients of circumstance. This dual-track methodology adds new tools to the growing body of computational approaches for understanding the conceptual framing of politically charged topics.