The Media Research Center’s Jorge Bonilla was in full Trump Regime Media mode in an April 3 post pushing the approved narrative about arrested immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia:
The story of the “Maryland father” deported to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT supermax prison continues to garner “victim porn” coverage on Spanish-language media. But in order for the story to stick, there need to be significant omissions and distortions when discussing the “victim” in this case.
Consider the many omissions and deflections during Telemundo’s very brief coverage of the story for its midday newscast:
[…]The 27-second brief accomplishes its purpose: it casts the “Maryland father” as a victim of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement, casts the deportation as cruel and imperiling a family, and tries to establish that he is completely innocent of any allegations. But this is false.
The amount of omissions required to make this case to the viewing public is simply astounding. There are no mentions of the individual’s suspected gang affiliations, or of the details of his 2019 arrest. There is no mention of the fact that multiple immigration courts found that there was credible evidence linking the deportee to MS-13 including, per a confidential informant: confirmed affiliation, gang name, and gang rank.
Bonilla’s evidence to back this up is a clip of Amber Duke, a writer for the right-wing Daily Caller, who claimed that it was suspicious that Garcia was wearing Chicago Bulls attire, which is sometimes MS-13, “but not always,” adding that “There are also not a lot of Chicago Bulls fans in Maryland,” and that at the time of his arrest outside a Home Depot, others who were also arrested at the time “were not just MS-13 gang members, but actually ranking members of the gang.” No proof was offered for this, only anonymous claims from a confidential informant. Still, Bonilla insisted that this piece was evidence of “a narrative in furtherance of advocacy against border enforcement.”
The next day, Nicholas Fondacaro referenced the Duke interview to claim that “not one, but two immigration courts found that there was enough evidence to suggest Garcia was in league with the Salvadorian gang MS-13. Apparently, a trusted confidential informant could confirm to federal authorities that Garcia was a ranking member in the gang. When Garcia was first arrested in 2019, he was allegedly associating with other members of MS-13.”
Bill D’Agostino spent an April 7 post complaining that Garcia — who had apparently lived in Maryland since 2019 — was referred to “as a ‘Maryland man’ or ‘Maryland father’ a whopping 120 times, while identifying him as an illegal alien only three times. Meanwhile, MSNBC alone aired eleven objectively false assertions that Garcia was actually a legal resident”:
Garcia has had an outstanding order of removal since 2019. However, because of his supposed fear of persecution by gang members in his home country, an immigration court granted him a withholding of removal to El Salvador. It’s important to note that a withholding of removal does not confer legal residency; rather, it merely means that the individual in question is temporarily exempt from being removed to the one specific country for which he was granted the withholding.
In other words, Garcia still could have been deported to any other country that was willing to take him, and at no point was he granted legal residency.
Predictably, CNN and MSNBC utterly failed to elucidate this distinction to their viewers.
Tim Graham repeated D’Agostino’s spin in his podcast that day.