Im-Politic: The Mainstream Media Keep Coddling Illegal Alien Crime

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Central America, crime, gang violence, gangs, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Long Island, Mainstream Media, MS-13, Open Borders, Rupert Murdoch, The New York Post, The New York Times, Trump

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and bloggers.

I’m in the middle of a planned little RealityChek break but sometimes you can be sitting around reading the papers lazily and an item (or two) just jolts you into action. In this case, it was the radically different coverage by The New York Post and The New York Times of Friday’s announcement of mass arrests on Long Island, New York, of alleged members of the Central America-based gang MS-13.

MS-13 is held responsible for any number of horrific murders and other crimes in the area (and around the nation), and the news made the front pages of both papers. The Post‘s initial display was more prominent, but then again, it’s a more regionally focused publication, so no one can have any legitimate beef with The Times somewhat lower key approach. Indeed, let’s not forget that The Times is a more than somewhat lower-keyed paper to start with.

But here’s what should be the subject of a big beef. Even though immigration policy was by no means the Post article’s main angle, the print edition article did quote “a federal source” (federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities worked together on the investigations leading to the arrests) as saying that an estimated half of the defendants are non-citizens in the United States illegally. (This claim was left out of the on-line version.) Both versions of the article quoted (presumably other) officials as stating that the newly indicted, in the reporters’ words, “include illegal immigrants, US citizens, and non-citizens who are in the country legally.”

And at the very end, the article noted that “President Donald Trump has often cited the dangers of the MS-13 “infestation” to push for tougher immigration laws.”

All in all, then, this tabloid, owned by Australian conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and which often covers and comments on the President favorably, looks to have provided an account of the arrests with an appropriate degree of balance and context.

You’d think that The New York Times, which long has proudly boasted that it presents “All the News That’s Fit to Print” would have performed at least as well. But do you know how many times The Times coverage, in print or on-line, mentioned the legal status of any of those arrested? Exactly none.

The paper did manage, though, to report – quite prominently in the piece – that “The gang’s notoriety and bloody tactics have caught the attention of President Trump, who has often invoked its name and reputation as a way to justify his immigration policy. He has referred to the group as an ‘infestation’ and to its members as ‘animals.’ In 2018, he invited the mother of one MS-13 murder victim to be his guest at the State of the Union address.

“And on Friday, the president went on Twitter to use the arrests as an argument for his immigration policy, saying that the gang takedown was an example of how ‘we are getting MS-13 gang members, and many other people that shouldn’t be here, out of our country.’”

In other words, any’one relying solely on The Times coverage could easily have gotten the impression that Mr. Trump is simply using MS-13 as a baseless – or at least suspicious – way to fan immigration-related fears. 

Since it’s a free country, The Times is perfectly within its rights to pretend or to suggest that the spread of Central American-based gangs like MS-13 has absolutely nothing to do with American immigration policy — except in the minds of xenophobes like President Trump.  But this kind of treatment belongs in its commentary pages, not in hard news reporting where facts and accurate context are supposed to matter.

Sadly, though, the paper’s coverage is only the latest instance of Mainstream Media news organizations — and other Open Borders supporters — coddling a vicious criminal ring which would have only a minor presence in America had the nation’s previous Presidents and Congresses taken seriously their responsibility to enforce border security.  As a result, it’s legitimate to wonder how many more innocent residents of this country, legal and illegal, need to be victimized by illegal alien crime for its enablers to wake up. 

Im-Politic: More Mainstream Media MS-13 – and Illegal Alien Crime – Double Standards

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Hannah Dreier, illegal alien crime, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Long Island, Mainstream Media, MS-13, ProPublica, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Trump

Anyone still doubting that the Mainstream Media has turned into a brazen propaganda machine for Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, should ask themselves this: Why did The New York Times recently devoted a humongous article in its Sunday magazine to mistakes made by law enforcement on Long Island and elsewhere in the fight against Hispanic gangs like MS-13 – whose ranks are filled with illegal aliens – yet completely ignore stabbings by such gang members in the same Long Island community shortly after the magazine investigation appeared?`

The magazine article, by Hannah Dreier of “the independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization” ProPublica was clearly viewed as more than just another freelance piece by the publication’s editors. As they state, it was “a collaboration” between the two organizations. Along with its length, this relationship makes clear that The Times viewed the subject as an unusually high priority.

In the December 27 article, Dreier does a good job – along with whatever assistance the newspaper provided her – of making a case that the intensified anti-MS-13 drive on Long Island and elsewhere in the country has caught up innocents. She also makes a reasonable case that the problem is rooted in the Trump administration’s dissatisfaction with its predecessors’ approach to the problem which, in her words, takes “time and on-the-ground work. Immigration agents spend months mapping out networks and gathering evidence using informants and wiretaps.”

Less convincing is her clear implication that this approach was remotely satisfactory, especially in light of her implicit acknowledgment that, while this more patient, more careful strategy was being pursued, MS-13 thugs on Long Island had

“periodically taken part in brutal killings. In 2003, in Central Islip, members beat and stabbed to death a young man who they thought was a rival and stuffed his body in a drain pipe. Also in Central Islip, the gang shot a toddler and his mother in 2010 and left their bodies in a patch of woods.

“In the last few years, Long Island’s MS-13 members and victims have gotten younger. In 2016, MS-13 gang members murdered five Latino Brentwood High students with bats and machetes. In 2017, the gang killed three more local Latino students and left their macheted bodies in a park in Central Islip. Some two dozen young men from Brentwood and Central Islip were eventually charged with the murders. A few were as young as 16.”

Also interesting: The author writes that “Many [Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE] agents wanted to arrest and deport suspected MS-13 members under President Obama. But they were constrained by an Obama-administration policy that required ICE agents to focus on undocumented immigrants who had committed serious crimes.” Meaning that Mr. Obama didn’t consider the above killings “serious crimes”? Just wow.

Indeed, writes Dreier, “President Trump took office at the peak of this local wave of violence” – hence his decision “that he was making the gang a federal law-enforcement priority.” The dragnet created by the Trump Justice Department and local law enforcement on Long Island (and in other communities that participated in such programs) has no doubt erred in instances. But there’s also no doubt that the old methods were failing.

In other words, I wish that Dreier (and her Times collaborators) had presented a much more balanced view of the situation and the results of the two strategies, but let’s grant that in a single article – even one as long as this one – has every right to maintain an overall emphasis.

It’s the follow-up – or, more accurately, its complete absence – that puts The Times in such a bad light. Specifically, on January 9 – only some two weeks after this magazine article’s appearance – two teenagers from one of the Long Island high schools on which Dreier focused were stabbed near a local fast food restaurant. The following day, the Suffolk County (Long Island) District Attorney charged that the three suspects arrested were MS-13 members, and all were illegal aliens. They all attended that same high school. For good measure, two of the accused assailants had been detained by ICE, which hoped to deport them, but were ordered released by federal judges.

Given the lengthy coverage The Times had just devoted to law enforcement mistakes, and given that Long Island is part of the paper’s home base, you’d think that a write-up of this incident would have been judged reasonably big news. Or any kind of news. But as of this morning – a week after the stabbings – not a single word about them had appeared in The Times.

Even stranger: In the weeks before Dreier’s lengthy article was published, the paper’s local coverage had run several articles on local MS-13 crimes. Its national staff has looked into the gang and its atrocities, too, but nothing as detailed as the Dreier “mistakes” piece has appeared. It’s in these national pieces, of course, that policy and policy debates are likeliest to be mentioned, and most such coverage stressed either that MS-13 isn’t such a big deal (e.g., here) or that its presence has little to do with illegal immigration and is being used by the President as a political prop (e.g., here), or that his descriptions of the Democrats’ views of the gang are misleading (e.g., here), that the president’s claims of progress versus its predation are exaggerated (e.g., here). And by now, it should come as no surprise that The Times has never published any item about victims of crime by illegal aliens, or about the failure of the pre-Trump programs in preventing such offenses, that’s been nearly as long as Dreier’s opus.  (Here‘s the only recent example of reporting on the subject.) 

Former Times news chief Jill Abramson is coming out with a book claiming, among other things, that the paper’s news pages have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” The magazine’s Dreier article, and its other MS-13 coverage – and non-coverage – sure looks like a leading example.