British left-wing newspaper the Guardian published a blatantly misleading sympathy piece about a deported illegal alien on Wednesday.
The online piece, by Guardian chief U.S. reporter Ed Pilkington, presents Maribel Trujillo, an illegal alien from Mexico, as victim of what her lawyer and Pilkington’s headline describe as the “heartless policies” of President Donald Trump.
The article contains several obvious falsehoods, most pressingly its repeated assertion that illegal entry to the United States is not a crime. Pilkington describes Trujillo as “a mother of four American children from Fairfield, Ohio, who has never committed any crime in the 15 years she has lived in the US.”
Trujillo is not from Fairfield, Ohio, but from Mexico. She is not now, nor has she ever been, a national of any country but Mexico. She also has committed at least one federal crime: 8 USC §1325(a) – Improper Entry by Alien. The statute reads, “Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers … shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned[.]” And yet Pilkington describes Trujilo as having “no history at all of crime.”
Not only does the story, presented as the “latest sign Trump administration is indiscriminately targeting undocumented immigrants,” obfuscate the crime Trujillo committed 15 years ago (a period Pilkington inexplicably describes as “almost two decades”), it ignores the ostensible victim’s history with the law since. Federal authorities have been trying to remove Trujillo from America for ten of the fifteen years she has illegally resided in our country.
According to the George Soros-funded pro-open borders organization Human Rights Watch, she was arrested for the first time by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2007 as part of an enforcement action aimed at the rampant and often inhumane use of illegal workers in the meat packing industry. A 2011 report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform details the impact of illegal aliens on wages in that sector.
Since her initial arrest, Trujillo, with the help of immigration lawyers, has managed to stave off deportation under successive administrations. Finally, in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s tenure, she has handed an order of deportation. Right up until her boarding a flight back to her country Wednesday morning, she continued her attempts to thwart deportation, filing a claim for asylum at the beginning of the month based on the fact that drug cartel’s operate in Mexico. Wednesday’s deportation came only after the claim failed. Pilkington himself characterizes this narrative as “the latest sign that the Trump administration is indiscriminately targeting undocumented immigrants.”
Breitbart News has discovered left-leaning journalists in the act of working with immigration attorneys to assemble these sympathetic stories before. In that report, Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News, “The mainstream media always looks for sob stories to undermine the legitimacy of immigration enforcement … They almost never like to tell comparable stories … of people killed by illegal immigrants, of the small contractor put out of business by those employing immigrant labor.”
It this instance, Trujillo’s story was picked up by many left-leaning news outlets as it unfolded, including the Rachel Maddow Show, the DailyKos, and at least one additional story in the Guardian. Each presents narrative of illegal alien victimhood and suggests, if not as strongly Pilkington, that Trujillo has committed no crime. None presents similarly sympathetic accounts of the negative effects of illegal migration.
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