The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.” So thundered a Washington Post report on August 29. There’s just one problem: It isn’t true.
The practices cited by the Post to substantiate its claim—increased scrutiny of birth certificates, higher numbers of passport denials—predate the Trump administration. The paper has now appended a lengthy correction to the report, but the correction sidesteps the main problem: The whole point of the story was that the uniquely dastardly Trump administration had come up with these policies. It had not.
One of the many outrageous mistakes in the Post’s piece had to do with the case of a doctor who, over the course of decades, had delivered hundreds of babies in the Rio Grande Valley. According to the paper, the State Department considered accusing the doctor of faking birth certificates. The doctor, Jorge Treviño, has since died, but his family says the Post’s reporter, Kevin Sieff, never contacted them to ask about the State Department’s inquiry. If he had, he might have learned that State only wanted to verify some certificates signed by the doctor. Treviño’s office used a typewriter to draw up the certificates with multiple carbon copies, and his signature wasn’t legible on the bottom copies. It had nothing to do with faking certificates.
More importantly, reporter Sieff might have learned that the State Department’s inquiries to Treviño’s office began in 2015—under the Obama administration.
Whoopsie.
It gives us pleasure to note that the reporter who eviscerated the Post’s incompetent journalism and forced the capital city’s paper of record to issue a rambling, disingenuous retraction was Roque Planas of the Huffington Post. Lefty new-media organizations like HuffPo have committed excesses over the years, to be sure, but they are capable, too, of the kind of solid journalism that, in this case, makes the Washington Post look like a supermarket tabloid.
