I would not put it beyond our federal immigration officers to arrest, detain, and mistreat law-abiding citizens or legal residents. But I also would not put it beyond our major media outlets to grossly and intentionally mislead their readers.
Consider this recent article in the New Yorker.
That sounds like a gross miscarriage of justice. This is what happens when you have a president who believes he is above the law. This probably reflects racism, and it’s the sort of abuse of power we should expect from law enforcement.
It’s also a totally misleading account.
In the 19th paragraph, the article mentions that Orville Etoria, the “sixty-two-year-old man who’d lived in New York for nearly 50 years,” spent half of those 50 years in prison for murdering someone. The story never mentions that the Obama administration ordered Etoria deported upon his release from prison, and that it was only former President Joe Biden’s extraordinary open-borders experiment that allowed a murderer with a deportation order to stay here.
Deporting Etoria was not the radical move. Letting him stay was. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” caused the New Yorker to decide a murder conviction is irrelevant.
Should deported criminals be sent to a scorpion-filled prison in Eswatini? I lean hard-no on that. But from reading this article, I cannot fully conclude that this aspect of President Donald Trump‘s deportation order is inhumane because I have to wonder what else is being left out.
This is not a unique situation in the Trump era, either. The president does lots of very bad stuff. But liberal-leaning major media also totally misrepresents what Trump does every day. So when an honest reader, interested in the truth about the administration, comes across a story about some Trump horror, they have to say, “I believe Trump might do what’s reported here, but I also believe that the media is basically trying to fool me.”
TRUMP SAYS HE WILL PAUSE IMMIGRATION FROM ‘THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES’ AFTER SHOOTING
Perversely, this protects Trump from accountability. The median American voter supported Trump in 2024, but is not a huge fan of Trump. If they have been paying attention for the past decade, they have the same reaction I do: Maybe Trump’s administration is being perversely cruel to immigrants, but maybe I’m just being lied to again.
It seems the best way to hold Trump accountable is to shoot straight with your readers.