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| Illegal immigrants being housed in cages (screenshot -PBS) |
I am so tired of the extreme media bias. And yes. It is extreme. Never before has it come into such stark focus as it has under the Trump administration. There is hardly any mention of the name Trump without either an overt or disguised negative comment. It almost doesn’t matter who is reporting it. The attitude is the same. Anything the President says or does is bad. No matter what it is. Even his accomplishments are spun into the negative.
One of the most irritating examples of this is the illegal immigrant situation. In a rare moment of honest reporting, PBS’s Judy Woodruff interviewed former DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Secretary (under Obama) Jeh Johnson. Surprisingly he did not paint it as all Trump’s fault. In some ways he actually corroborated a lot of what the current President has been saying about it.
It is obvious that the conditions in which illegal immigrants are forced to live are deplorable. There is no dispute about that. Report after report and interview after interview of people involved with these migrants and whose bias against the President is palpable - keep talking about how terrible things are. People are locked up in cages - virtual concentration camps. These poor immigrant families including many small children are living in filth with little food and practically no medical care.
The implication in using the term ‘concentration camp’ is that what Trump is doing is no better than what Nazi Germany did to the Jews.
But unlike the mainstream media and Democrats Johnson did not blame everything on the President.
The picture above features one of those cages. But that picture was taken under the Obama administration. It was of then DHS secretary Johnson touring that facility. So much for Trump creating these cages. They have been there at least since the Obama administration.
What about all those scoffing at Trump’s claim that the conditions are better at those facilities there now than they are where these migrants came from? Johnson corroborates that too. It is exactly what Johnson said.
This is not to say he wasn’t critical of the President. He was. But his criticism was fair and unbiased. He said the real problem is the unprecedented and overwhelming numbers of people trying to get in, not enough space to hold them all, and a staff not sufficiently large enough to handle it.
Despite the best efforts of Trump haters to repeatedly cast Trump as a racist, anti immigrant antisemite interested only in a ‘white’ America - he is none of those things. He marred an immigrant and has Jewish grandchildren. His Vice President just addressed a group of newly naturalized citizens trumpeting that accomplishment, warmly welcoming them, and noting that they all came here legally. This is what America is all about. It happens everyday in America. But it has been all but ignored by the media in their quest to cast the President as anti immigrant.
If one is to be truly honest and face the truth of their bias, they would see what is really happening. We are currently experiencing an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration that is overwhelming detention facilities and the immigration officials manning the border. Added to this is that unlike the past where illegals would come individually, they are now coming as families. There just aren’t enough people or places to keep them. Which results in the kind of deplorable overcrowded cages we see day after day in the mainstream media. Along with the not so subtle implication that it is all Trump’s fault.
The truth is that congress is unwilling or unable to provide the finances to add more personnel so that these illegals can be treated more humanely. And I agree with Johnson about the need to do something about the even more about the deplorable conditions in their countries of origin impelling them to seek the far better but still deplorable conditions they are in now.
That said, I do not agree with everything the President is doing in this regard. I do not for example believe that separating children from their parents was the right thing to do. It was both inhumane and immoral. I also don’t like the idea of not fast tracking legal immigration of parents or grandparents of legal immigrants already living here - same as spouses and children. I also think that the so-called ‘dreamers’ should be legalized and fast tracked to citizenship (if they so choose). And I also believe that the President and congress should try and do something to alleviate conditions in the countries these illegals are fleeing from.
But at the same time I agree with the President that we need to better secure our borders which congress and the President (neither of which has the world compromise in their vocabulary) are not acting upon. We need a major overhaul of our immigration laws.
In the meantime congress should immediately apportion the funds to meet the current challenges at the border. And to stop using the current conditions as a weapon with which to bash the President. Because that is really all it is. The deplorable conditions are as much the fault of congress as they are the fault of the President. But as Johnson indicated - the fault lies mainly upon the oppressive countries causing those overwhelming numbers to flee.