Nobody will fact-check Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, for lying about the 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who died. That’s because liberals and the news media don’t care about the telling the truth on immigration.
Feinstein said last week that it was “illegal and simply barbaric” the way Jakelin Caal Maquin was treated by U.S. border agents, essentially faulting them for her death. But by all accounts, even that of Maquin’s father, the girl was given every resource possible when she was taken into custody after crossing a remote location on the southern border in New Mexico.
Maquin and her father, along with nearly 200 other migrants illegally crossing into the U.S., were apprehended at night on Dec. 6, according to the Washington Post.
They were transported 90 minutes away to the nearest Border Patrol station by bus and offered food and water.
Maquin, having traveled more than 2,000 miles from Guatemala, broke into a deadly fever and began vomiting while in transit. Agents called ahead to the station, and when she arrived, she was helicoptered to a children’s hospital. She died on Dec. 8 from what the Department of Homeland Security believes to have been a severe infection.
Guatemalan Consul Tekandi Paniagua told CNN on Saturday that the Maguin’s father had “no complaints about how Border Patrol agents treated him and his daughter.”
That Maquin died is a tragedy, but there was nothing “barbaric” about her treatment. And it’s a vile slander to claim that the U.S. government, which expended every available resource to save her life, caused her to die. A news media with interest in explaining our dysfunctional immigration system, rather than advocating for open border chaos, would tell you that.
The media lie about immigrants receiving welfare, which they do in millions of dollars worth of food stamps and housing assistance. The media lie about the so-called family separation “crisis,” actually just standard operating procedure that also took place under former President Barack Obama.
The Associated Press in June published an extensive report on a lawsuit filed by an illegal immigrant minor who claimed he had been abused in U.S. detention centers. The report naturally tied the lawsuit to the administration, but (surprise!) his abuse claims go back the Obama years.
Not once in the AP’s original report did Obama’s name come up. It was only added after I asked them why.
The media even lie about small things, like when President Trump called brutally violent MS-13 gang members, with ties to Central America and known for hacking up their victims with machetes, “animals.”
“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump said at the White House in May during a meeting with immigration and law enforcement officials. “These aren’t people. These are animals.”
A New York Times headline at the time blared, “Trump Calls Some Unauthorized Immigrants ‘Animals’ in Rant.”
USA Today: “Trump ramps up rhetoric on undocumented immigrants: ‘These aren’t people. These are animals.’”
CNBC’s John Harwood at least got the context right when he tweeted that “however repugnant their actions, MS-13 gang members are human beings …” That’s a lot better than most journalists did at the time.
With supposedly objective media spreading so many lies, how can Americans expect to know anything about what’s happening at the border? The young girl who died should be yet another reminder of how poorly our laws work and how the chaos attracts people to make a dangerous, deadly crossing that no child should ever make. Democrats should be trying to fix the laws, but instead they and the news media just keep lying.
