A New Twist in the Muzzling of American Workers
American workers rarely factor into the mainstream media's immigration coverage unless they are being accused of being lazy or unintelligent. They rarely get a chance to tell their side of the story. The New York Times' coverage of the Obama Administration's review of 300,000 deportation cases is no exception, but it does add a new twist. In the story "U.S. to Review Cases Seeking Deportations," the muzzled voices don't belong to apple pickers, construction workers, or software engineers, but to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents charged with enforcing U.S. immigration laws.
To be clear, the Times story neither mentions that the illegal aliens who get their deportation orders halted will be eligible to apply for work permits, or considers the impact that will have on the American workers forced to compete with them. What's striking about the story, however, is the decision to sanitize the voices of dissent from within the government's own Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, which represents 7,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents across the nation, has been outspoken in its opposition to the new prosecutorial discretion policy. In June, 2010, they cast a "Vote of No Confidence" for ICE Director John Morton and Asst. Director Phyllis Coven, stating in a press release:
Director John Morten and Assistant Director Phyllis Coven have abandoned the Agency's core mission of enforcing the United States' Immigration Laws and providing for public safety, and have instead directed their attention to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty....
A year later, the National ICE Council issued another press release to ask citizens to call on Congress to halt the new policy and stating:
[The prosecutorial discretion policy] is just one of many new ICE policies in queue aimed at stopping the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in the United States.
And just last month, the president of the National ICE Council, Chris Crane testified before the House Judiciary sub committee on Immigration and Enforcement that:
[T]he Administration's policies will lead to victimization and death within the U.S. that was otherwise preventable. These policies are not an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, but instead an absence of prosecutorial discretion and accountability. They are not law enforcement actions, but the opposite. These policies take away officers' discretion and establish a system that mandates that the Nation's most fundamental immigration laws are not enforced.
The New York Times is aware of these statements, having partially quoted Chris Crane in a previous article. Yet this time around, The New York Times ignores this vital information and instead summarizes the agents' position, inaccurately, with this single sentence:
The approach of deporting some illegal immigrants but not others requires a deep change in the mentality of the agents, who have long operated on the principle that any violation was good cause for deportation.
You get used to euphemisms when you read a lot of immigration stories, but "a deep change in the mentality of the agents" is a new one!
The decision to downplay ICE agents' opposition to President Obama's policy in the story has the effect of marginalizing Rep. Lamar Smith and his Congressional allies who, the Times reports, denounce the new policy as amnesty. Readers may wrongly conclude that that they are alone in that opinion. And the ICE agents' union, who have long shared Rep. Smith's concerns, might wonder why their views are no longer worthy enough to be published.
JEREMY BECK is the Director of the Media Standards Project for NumbersUSA