Yesterday’s account from the Associated Press about the “expulsion” of illegal-alien minors raises more questions than it answers, not least why a purportedly neutral news agency didn’t include a few examples of illegals who should be immediately “expelled.”
The evil Trump administration deported 600 minors in April, AP lamented, before giving the minors and an irresponsible mother the chance to bellyache about their misfortune.
Meanwhile, reports from Customs and Border Protection show why President Trump’s decision to end asylum requests and immediately deport illegal aliens was the right one.
AP’s Big Lament
The minors would “normally be allowed to live with relatives while their cases wind through immigration courts,” AP reported, but no more, thanks to the Big Fat Meanie in the White House.
“Instead the Trump administration is quickly expelling them under an emergency declaration citing the coronavirus pandemic, with 600 minors expelled in April alone,” AP complained.
Having wrongly identified the deportation of illegal aliens as heartless “expulsions,” AP delivered the mandatory sob stories: “Two recently expelled teens said border agents told them they wouldn’t be allowed to request asylum. They were placed in cells, fingerprinted and given a medical exam. Then, after four days, they were flown back to their home country of Guatemala.”
Brenda, 16, left Guatemala in hopes of reaching the U.S. to eventually work and help her family. Her father works on a farm, but it’s not enough.
“We barely eat,” she said.
Her family borrowed $13,000 to pay a smuggler and months later she crossed illegally. Authorities later took her into custody in April at a Texas stash house, she said.
“I did ask to talk to my brother because he wanted to get a lawyer, because he wanted to fight for my case,” she said. “But they told me they were not letting people talk to anyone. No matter how much I fought, they were not letting anyone stay.”
Apparently, AP didn’t ask Brenda why, if her family “barely eats,” they didn’t spend the borrowed $13,000 on food and rent.
Another victim of Trump’s Frontier Gestapo, a border-jumping sprout named Osvaldo, “said agents wouldn’t let him call his father. He was held with other children in a cold room and issued a foil blanket as well as a new mask and pair of gloves each of the four days he was in custody.”
“I thought they would help me or let me fight my case,” Osvaldo cried to AP, “but no.”
Of course, Osvaldo has no “case.”
But that doesn’t mean the 10-year-old and his mother weren’t victims of 1600 Pennsylvania’s Oil Can Harry and his hard-hearted border police — even if Osvaldo’s mother did “[watch] him swim across the Rio Grande,” which might well be classified as child endangerment.
Rather than ask the mother what she was thinking when she urged her son to ford the river, AP listened to her long lament.
The little shaver landed back in Honduras, where a “relative has agreed to take him back to the family’s rural village, if the mother returns to care for him. But she fears her former partner, who abused and threatened both of them.”
Another question AP didn’t ask, as far as a reader can tell: Why does escaping an abusive boyfriend or spouse require a 1,500-mile trip to the United States?
What AP Didn’t Report
Dispatches from Customs and Border Protection in the last week — the first most relevant to Trump’s immediate deportation order and his terminating asylum applications due to the Chinese Virus — suggest that AP is clueless:
• On Friday, agents in Escobares, Texas, bagged two Mexican drug dealers and seized 200 .50-caliber bullets. One has been deported three times since late 2018 and tested positive for the virus.
• The same day, agents in Lordsburg, New Mexico, arrested a Mexican illegal with two convictions for felony assault: “The subject is a registered sex offender who was previously found guilty for one count of sexual assault against a child and a second count of an assault causing serious bodily injury.”
• Yesterday, agents collared another Mexican illegal near Hidalgo, Texas, with a prior arrest for child molestation and a “significant criminal history to include marijuana and cocaine possession.”
• Also yesterday, agents bagged another Mexican illegal near Pinitas, Texas, with a “significant criminal history in California to include sexual battery (misdemeanor), burglary and narcotics possession with intent to distribute.”
• On Tuesday, agents in Arizona’s Yuma sector arrested five illegals from Bangladesh.
• On Monday, north of Laredo, border agents stopped a tractor-trailer packed with 49 illegals, including four kids, from Mexico and Central America.
Image: designer491/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
