Playing a numbers game, USA Today reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “set a record for arrests of undocumented immigrants who don’t have a criminal record.”
The claim, which suggests that “non-criminals” are being swept up en masse, is as politically correct as the “undocumented” moniker the newspaper applies to illegal aliens.
ICE’s Fiscal Year 2018 report, from which USA Today gleaned its story line, tells the fuller story: “[As in FY2017,] nine out of 10 ICE arrests had criminal conviction(s), pending charge(s), were ICE fugitives or illegally re-entered the country after previously being removed.”
Common sense would include all these individuals as criminal actors. Media outlets weave a misleading narrative by counting only the first category and excluding the rest.
Fortunately, ICE frames the big picture. As Nathalie Asher, acting head of the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, aptly put it: “One hundred percent of those arrested are immigration violators.”
ALSO AT FAIR: Other Media Outlets Misreport ICE Arrests
While reporting the deportation of 256,085 illegal aliens last year (up from 226,119 in 2017 and 240,255 in 2016), ICE said: “We continue to prioritize [our]limited resources on public safety threats and immigration violators.”
If the media want to practice journalism that serves the public interest, they ought to objectively examine those strained resources and the hurdles that ICE confronts in carrying out its mission.
With the proliferation of so-called sanctuary policies, more jurisdictions and local law-enforcement agencies have stopped communicating with ICE. That lack of cooperation undermines ICE’s ability to detain illegal aliens when they are released from local jails. This makes ICE’s job more difficult, more resource-intensive and, ultimately, less efficient – all of which helps explain why arrests were down 12 percent from the previous year.
That’s the bigger story.
3 Comments
They’re already criminals when illegally entering the country just Stop PUSSYFOOTING around the Mexican Border problem BUILD THE WALL & DEPORT THEM!!!!
The President in the Rose Garden: “In recent weeks we’ve seen a surge of unaccompanied children brought here and to other countries by smugglers and traffickers” and later said if Congress didn’t act then “I’m going to act alone because we don’t have enough resources”. There goes Trump again, making stuff up when there’s no emergency. Except that was Obama in 2014. And the numbers were a fraction of now. For all those with their great concern for “the children” now, it’s apparently ok to have these children brought here by traffickers who see them only as a source of income. They don’t seem to want to stop it.
But what did our leading lights in the media have to say then , as opposed to now. The Washington Post on July 12, 2014 about: “The current crisis on the Southwest border where authorities have apprehended tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children since October”. Note that it’s tens of thousands in a nine month period, whereas that’s happening in a few weeks now. Crisis then, manufactured emergency now.
June 5, 2014 the New York Times: “This is what it looks like when an immigration system is overwhelmed” and “The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been ordered to coordinate efforts to contain the crisis”. There’s that word again, crisis. I think we missed all the Democrats back then who came down on Obama for trying to stem the flow. Perhaps because they didn’t.
Michael Avenatti indicted on numerous fraud and blackmail charges. But the allegations were really nothing new. Appeared over a hundred times on CNN and MSNBC when they needed someone to trash Trump and bring forth “witnesses” against Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearings, witnesses whose stories were preposterous on the face of them. He even was discussed, seriously, as a Democratic presidential candidate.
The minute they made the decision to cross the border illegally, they committed a crime. NO ONE COMES ACROSS ANY COUNTRY’S BORDER WITHOUT PERMISSION. End of story. DEPORT them all., NO DACA. We do not reward bad behavior.