In the moral battle between President Donald Trump and the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, the media have chosen a side. The foreign gangsters are less morally questionable than the president.
The Trump administration sent a plane stuffed with alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador, which is apparently more of a crime than whatever the gangsters did in America.
There are legal issues here. An Obama-appointed federal judge tried to order Trump not to send the plane. The administration didn't release their names or their offenses, so some may not be gangsters. The flight can be debated. But in today's media, the first objective is to present Trump as a malignant actor. The tone of his coverage should be all negative all the time. There's nothing resembling an "achievement" on immigration.
On "CBS Mornings Plus," co-host Adriana Diaz weirdly touted an upcoming segment to explain what "the Trump administration's move to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants using a law from 1798 could mean for you today." It sounded like Whoopi Goldberg claiming on "The View" that any of us could be deported for being on the wrong side of Trump.
Then came this false labeling. Diaz opened a segment this way: "Joining us now to break it all down is Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer with the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Her work focuses specifically on wartime powers and the constitutional separation of powers."
To be blunt, this is a lie. This leftist group may be tax-exempt, but it's not nonpartisan. Take a look at the OpenSecrets website for campaign contributions by employees of the Brennan Center for Justice. It lists hundreds of contributions -- but only to liberal PACs and to Democrats, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for President. Four Brennan Center staffers donated to Kamala Harris' presidential campaign last year.
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You can also tell this is a Democrat episode on CBS when Diaz compared Trump's flight of gangsters and their legal justification under a 1798 law to "the internment of 31,000 noncitizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent after the bombings of Pearl Harbor." CBS mentioned Ronald Reagan apologized for it as a regrettable episode of "racial prejudice," but they didn't mention the president at that time was their Democrat hero Franklin Roosevelt.
"Nonpartisan" Ebright played the same game: "(T)he internment of 31,000 noncitizens without due process and based principally on their ancestry was a shameful moment in American history. And so reviving the Alien Enemies Act to target new ethnic groups today is, frankly, un-American and it shows that we haven't learned from the mistakes of our past."
So FDR was "un-American"? It's weird when the Left calls things "un-American," since they generally hate nationalism and patriotism in all its forms. Any border enforcement against illegal aliens (even violent criminals) is "targeting ethnic groups," as if it's just like FDR interning actual American citizens.
The only balancing note was co-host Tony Dokoupil acknowledging these gangsters committed some crimes in America. He noted officials said the gangsters trade immigration paperwork and hide their gang affiliation: "So within the law, what can this government do to take care of the very real threat of violence without trampling on the civil liberties that you're concerned about?"
The Left touts the "civil liberties" of illegal immigrants as if they were uniformly sympathetic Trump victims. When some of these people commit violent crimes -- and the raped and/or murdered people lose their civil liberties -- networks like CBS ignore or downplay them because that would feel like positive coverage for Trump, and that cannot be allowed.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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