On Sunday, the Washington Post cranked up its Terrorized Migrant meme to the max, with adjectives galore in the face of approaching lawful deportations. The front page featured a scary headline in the upper right corner (shown) although the huge California earthquake got the central photo.
An uninformed reader might think that President Trump is a meanie racist who hates foreigners, judging from the overwrought verbiage more suitable to a tabloid than the capitol city newspaper.
In fact, the deportees have gone through all the court proceedings and have been found to require removal. Presumably, the aliens will choose to take their kids along home which would be natural, though the Post worried a lot about Families and The Children.
Here’s the online version with a slightly different headline:
Fear of immigration raids looms as plans for ICE ‘family operation’ move forward, Washington Post, July 6, 2019
President Trump said his administration will move forward “fairly soon” with a plan to arrest thousands of migrant families in surprise roundups across major U.S. cities, with the two-week deadline he imposed on Democrats coming up on Saturday.
Trump tipped off the mass arrests in a June 17 tweet, vowing “millions” of deportations, but called them off five days later. The president tweeted that he delayed the raids for two weeks at Democrats’ request, “to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”
“If not,” he wrote, “Deportations start!”
Trump’s threats have left immigrants living in the United States illegally in a fog of dread, putting neighborhoods on edge and making residents fear venturing outside.
Eva, who works at a plant nursery in Homestead, Fla., said she has stopped going to the park and makes trips to the grocery store every few weeks.
“I don’t know when I leave in the morning if I’ll come home in the night,” said Eva, who arrived illegally 19 years ago from Mexico and whose teen daughter is a U.S. citizen.
“They could come and get me at any time,” she said, asking for her last name to be withheld for fear it could help ICE find her. (Continues)
Below, the United States cannot be the Welfare/Employment Office to the World, so deportations must go forward. Foreigners need to stay home and fix their own countries because billions cannot come here.
Meanwhile, the new acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli was doing the rounds of the Sunday shows with a lot more facts. He appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation and the 12-minute discussion was surprisingly rational.
Here’s a snip from the transcript that refers to the deportations:
CBS INTERVIEWER MARGARET BRENNAN: So what is the administration going to do?
KEN CUCCINELLI: Well, essentially at this point it’s been put in Matt Albence’s hand, the acting director at ICE. He’s a career ICE officer, came up through the ranks and they’re ready to just perform their mission which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders. They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort, or not, is really just information kept within ICE at this point.
BRENNAN: So there had been reports that this would be just in the thousands. You’re saying the roundups will be far larger scale.
CUCCINELLI: No, no I’m just pointing out that the pool of those with final removal orders is enormous. And, it’s important to note, here we are talking about ICE doing its job as if it’s special. And really this should be going on on a rolling basis for ICE and they’ve been interfered with effectively and held up by the politics of Washington to a certain extent and they’re looking forward to just getting back to doing their job.
BRENNAN: Well, the Trump administration has deported far fewer people than the Obama administration had.
CUCCINELLI: Thus far. Thus far, that’s right. Well, and of course ICE has been, for much of the Trump Administration, has been swamped with — they’re in the second stage of the border crisis. We focus so much on the Border Patrol. But the reason you see overcrowding in those facilities is because they can’t be moved to the facilities where they were expected to go and those are ICE facilities because the ICE facilities themselves are over capacity. So the whole pipeline is clogged and ICE is backing up the Border Patrol in the southwest border.
