Advancing the interests of middle- and low-income Americans isn’t something the news media grasps. That’s why, to this day, journalists are more concerned with our short-lived “family separation” policy but say not a word about the drug dealers and convicted child molesters who hop across the southern border and into our neighborhoods.
The New York Times on Wednesday ran a front-page story yet again on “family separation” and the “bonds” that were “broken” as a result.
The Trump administration’s policy to prosecute all illegal aliens (otherwise known as “enforcing the immigration laws”) ended more than two years ago, yet the media are still printing weepy stories about the plight of immigrants who knowingly crossed the border illegally and threw themselves into the care of Border Patrol.
The main subject of the New York Times‘s story is a Guatemalan woman, Leticia Peren, and her son Yovany, whom she brought here in 2017 when he was 15 years old. The pair were separated, and Peren made the choice to leave her son in the United States and see herself deported.
That must have been terrible. No mother wants to be kept from her child. But it was a price Peren was willing to pay if it meant a better life for her son, who was not entitled to stay here but was nonetheless allowed to do so. He was taken in by a family in Texas, where he made friends and began to attend school.
The New York Times said that Peren left Guatemala after “lawlessness in her city” began to “intensify,” culminating in gang members pressuring her son to join them. “At one point,” the story says, “a man held a gun to her head and threatened to kill Yovany if she did not come up with several thousand quetzales a month, which she did not have.”
Peren made it back to the U.S. — the story doesn’t say how, only that she is now seeking asylum. She and her son were reunited in New York. However, Peren “has come to understand that being reunited with her son did not restore the bonds they once shared.” True, but at least she’s less likely to be extorted by violent Central American gang bangers, and he has an actual future.
The media don’t understand that immigration enforcement isn’t about hurting people who come here. It’s about protecting the people who are already here. Yes, there are some unfortunate consequences and some personally painful separations. But whose interests are the media looking out for?
