Headlines rang out this week with the distressing news that the federal government had deported a U.S. Army veteran.
NBC News reported in a headline, “Veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan is deported to Mexico.”
“After two tours in Afghanistan, US Army vet deported to Mexico,” read a title published by ABC News.
Meanwhile, CBS News went with this, “U.S. Army veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan deported to Mexico.”
Naturally, #resistance Twitter was all over the story:
This is awful. ICE is trying to deport an Army Veteran today. @SecNielsen can stop this if she wants. https://t.co/8vTP5Yk0Ek
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) March 23, 2018
And on and on the list goes.
The biggest problem with how these sort of headlines and tweets is that they all omit some pretty important context regarding the reason behind Miguel Perez Jr.’s deportation, namely his felony drug conviction. The Chicago Tribune has a good rundown of how the Army veteran, who claims he suffers from substance abuse issues and post-traumatic stress disorder following his tours overseas, got to this point [emphases added]:
Perez said he discovered the citizenship oversight when he was summoned to immigration court shortly before his September 2016 release from Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg. Instead of heading home to Chicago from prison, Perez was placed in the custody of [ICE] and transferred to a Wisconsin detention center for immigrants awaiting deportation.
If any of this feels familiar, it should. We went through all of this just last month, when one social media account scored a viral tweet by grossly mischaracterizing the facts of Perez’s then-looming deportation.
Yet, even after it has been shown that there is more to the story than activists have let on, the context-free version of Perez’s story persists to this day. Consider, for example, how Axios reported the news: “U.S. Army veteran deported to Mexico … He had served two tours in Afghanistan.”
Its very brief write up concludes with a section titled “Why it matters,” which reads that Perez’s, “deportation follows Trump and Sessions’ push to deport undocumented criminal offenders.”
But, wait – this entire story predates the Trump administration by at least two years.
As I’ve written before, Perez’s story is a sad one, especially as too many veterans struggle with drug abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it’s particularly disgraceful for politicos, activists (especially ones whose bosses were in the Oval Office when this first started) and reporters to seize (pounce?) on this episode as a means to attack the current administration.
(h/t Gabriel Malor)
