Media LIE: The Illegal Immigrant Horror Story That Wasn’t

We live in an age of narrative. Narrative matters more than the facts, and many of the people who know that work in the media, and many of them are opponents of Donald Trump’s agenda.

That means that any time President Trump tries to forward his agenda, he may face down actual false stories that are promulgated by the media that are antithetical to his actual agenda items.

The latest example is this insane example that has been totally under-covered, but is indicative of the way that so many in the media actually cover these stories. They don’t actually have personal knowledge of the story. They just report a story.

And it turns out the story is not true.

The Guardian reported:

An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who said they have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.

According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, longtime Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. So he and his wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.

When he arrived at the office on 20 June, however, he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. She said she herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.

The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.

Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, they said, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was. On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.

A week later, however, they discovered from a relative in Chile that Leon was alive after all – but now in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection.

So his family had said they couldn’t locate him and were told he died, and then he turned up in Guatemala. The DHS stated, “The family of the individual allegedly told reporters he was handcuffed and taken by federal officers at a green card appointment in Philadelphia. This claim is completely false. There’s no record of the man appearing at any green card appointment in or around the area of Philadelphia.” Furthermore, said the DHS, ICE has not deported Luis Leon.

Even the idea that he entered as a refugee from Pinochet is not true. This is an effort to demonize ICE agents, who are already facing an 830% increase in assaults against them.

The story is important because it demonstrates how information flows in the modern world, especially in the online world, where this went totally viral on X. 

Why does it work this way? Because X is a machine built for instantaneous response. Mark Twain famously suggested, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” That was somewhat true when Mark Twain was saying that back in the late 19th century, but it is much more true now when the online world means that lies are promulgated at an extraordinary rate, a truly extraordinary rate.

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And it’s true over and over and over again.

Take, for example, the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who was freed by a court after the Trump administration tried to deport him. He was a person who had garnered a student visa under false pretenses. He got a student visa claiming that he was coming to the United States to study, when in fact he was coming to the United States in order to act as a professional agitator.

He came to work with Students for Justice in Palestine and various other groups on the Columbia University campus, where he was going to promote wild anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sentiment.

And so Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that this is not what we are looking for in our immigrants. You’re gone.

So Khalil argued he was exercising his free speech rights. And Rubio fired back that we get to decide who comes into this country. We have the plenary power at State to decide whether someone is violating the edict, and we make the decision as to whether someone is of benefit to the United States.

The entire media came to Khalil’s defense, suggesting that Khalil was just a normal student who had no support for terrorist groups, that all the talk about him supporting terrorist groups was just false; he never would do something like that. He’s just a normal Left-wing guy who just really, really doesn’t like what Israel is doing in Gaza.

All of that blew up yesterday in an interview on CNN. He said the Trump administration is “weaponizing anti-Semitism.” He’s not really antisemitic. He’s not really a threat in any way. It’s just that the Trump administration is using antisemitism as a way of throwing out people they don’t like.

In the interview, he was asked multiple times whether he condemned Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, for what they did on October 7 and beyond. Over and over again, he refused to denounce Hamas.

Do you need people in the United States who don’t condemn State Department-labeled terrorist groups? That was Marco Rubio’s entire case. That was the case of the Trump administration when they tried to deport him.

It seems relatively inarguable. It’s one thing if you’re already a United States citizen; We don’t get to kick you out for having terrible views in the United States if you are a citizen.

But if you lie about why you came to the country and you came here as a political agitator on behalf of terrorist organizations, we should probably kick you out.

But the entire media went along with the idea that he was a wounded innocent who was merely parroting the rhetoric of mainstream Democratic officials. That was never true.

And by that time, it was too late for the debunking to happen.

This is happening all over the world. It’s not just true of the Trump administration immigration agenda. It’s true all over the world. The claims that are currently being made by mainstream media parroting the Gaza Ministry of Defense —which is controlled by Hamas — saying Israel is shooting people who are trying to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, are lies.

What is happening, however, is Hamas is infiltrating those lines, and they’re literally shooting at the IDF soldiers trying to draw fire. In response, Israel is attempting to separate Hamas terrorists from civilians. Hamas is literally killing people who are taking the aid from Israel because they wish to hijack the aid.

Another lie: Extremist local Jewish West Bank residents had set fire to the 1,500-year-old church of Saint George in the Palestinian village of Taiba. This is part and parcel of a broader attempt right now by some to claim that Israel is targeting Christians, which is not true. They’re doing this based on this false report, and also the lie that Israel purposefully targeted a church in the Gaza Strip. They did not purposefully target a church in the Gaza Strip. That would be a moral, intellectual, and strategic absurdity.

What would generate that? Why would Israel purposefully target a church? Clearly it was an accident. But it’s been run with by many of the people who are now trying to generate outsized pressure on Israel by claiming somehow that Israel is filled with people who hate Christians, which is very strange, considering that Israel is literally the only place in the entire region where Christians can live safely and securely while practicing their religion.

The story turned out to be false. The report was spread so widely, even American officials repeated it before investigating.

What actually happened? Local Jewish residents were fighting the fire. There are no burn marks anywhere on the church. It doesn’t have a roof because it hasn’t had a roof for a long time; it’s essentially an ancient site. There is contemporaneous footage showing young men from nearby farms running up the hill with fire extinguishing equipment, according to The Jerusalem Post.

This is, again, one of these narratives that runs out of control very, very quickly and is spread on services like X that do a terrible job of separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of what is true and what is false.

It is that which leads to wild distrust on every issue.

It is very difficult to lock down the facts. One of the things I try to do on my show is to take enough time when a controversial claim is made to determine whether or not it is true. And so I might wait a few hours to determine what actually happened in a given situation, or even a couple of days in murky circumstances.

But that is not what the internet favors these days. What the internet actually favors is an immediate response, right now, without information. And if you wait, you are condemned for waiting. The idea is that if you wait, you must have some secret sympathies in some way or another. Whereas, if you just react and jump to your preferred conclusion, that somehow means you are more honest in some way.

It’s not true. Waiting is frequently the best thing to do in unclear circumstances so as to allow time for the truth to arise. That is the thing that actually should matter.

You can speculate; you can theorize, but people aren’t in the business anymore of speculating or theorizing. They simply jump to whatever conclusion is the most advantageous for their narrative and for their position, and then they insist that position is true regardless of the next set of facts that comes out.