Topic category:  Other/General

Here’s the sort of thing you just can’t make up: A March 22 Associated Press story in the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer with the headline, “Nine arrested in immigration raid.”

The suspects, “from Indonesia, Mexico and Guatemala,” were arrested working at an Olive Garden restaurant in Charlotte. “The workers' names and their charges have not been released.”

That’s odd. If an American citizen of legal age is arrested, his name is released.

“ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said the nine workers will go before an immigration judge who will consider deportation. He said their immigration status is not public record.”

Huh?!

Initially, I wrote: Richard Rocha was lying, and the reporter had to know it; the immigration status of every living person resident in these Untied States is a matter of public record. Determining that status may be a problem, however, if a person’s true identity cannot be ascertained, which could well be an issue in this age of overdocumented invaders and those with fraudulent, Mexican consulate-issued matricular consular cards.

The authorities did not arrest the nine in the course of carrying out a drug raid, or a raid of an establishment for serving alcohol to minors, and this wasn’t a raid by the local Health Department for using stolen food.

But then I re-read the first of the two sentences: “will consider deportation.” (Please also see the headline.) Imagine the sort of cognitive dissonance involved in making or writing too such logically incompatible sentences, one after the other.

We do, however, know the name of one suspect: Amalia de la Cruz.

“The daughter of one woman arrested said her mother had worked at the restaurant for eight years. Adriana Sanchez said her mother, Amalia de la Cruz, 56, was from Mexico.’We want to talk to her and tell her not to sign anything,’ Sanchez said as she went to see her mother at the Mecklenburg County jail.”

That’s odd, as well. If “The workers' names and their charges have not been released,” how could one suspect’s daughter have already spoken with reporters? (And what might the named suspect be in danger of signing?) Because the names have been released.

And to claim that the workers’ names have not been released, even as you name one of them? I suppose the children of illegal immigrants always have local reporters’ telephone numbers on speed dial. (I was being sarcastic, but maybe I shouldn’t have been.)

You have to scratch your head and wonder why the story lied about the illegals’ immigration status. The first thing to note is that the ICE mouthpiece, Richard Rocha, lied, and the AP quoted his lie. But he’s the same source as the line about the possible deportation proceedings. I was just starting to get used to the authorities (assuming the reporter’s indirect quote of Rocha was honest) taking the lead in lying, where politically incorrect crimes are concerned (e.g., in denying that the white victims of the black Baytown serial rapist, Keith Hill, matched any profile, or that the Knoxville horror—see also here—was racially motivated). Socialist journalism professors and “journalism ethics experts” always love to talk about “objectivity,” but you don’t have to be a journalist or a “journalism ethics expert” to know that there is nothing journalistically objective in quoting unchallenged an obvious lie. But this business of indirectly quoting contradictory statements from the same source is new to me.

Let us briefly consider the AP’s possible motives for this offense.

1. The reporter (and Rocha?) wanted readers to know that the story was about illegals, but was forbidden by his editor (supervisor?) from doing so openly;

2. As is the case with many compulsive liars, the AP (and ICE?) lies even when doing so is obvious, just to keep in practice;

3. Someone at the AP with a sense of irony wanted to give readers a good belly laugh; and

4. The AP always tries to get the truth out (as one AP reporter once claimed to me, regarding an AP cover-up), but it’s those darned local editors that keep stymying them! Numbers one and two are options, but neither three nor four is; at the AP, having a sense of irony is a firing offense (the AP is heavy with the kind of folks who will say, “isn’t it ironic,” while letting loose with a leaden political platitude.), and as for #4, I can’t prove that a clear statement wasn’t on the AP’s feeds, but if it was, the consistency in suppressing certain politically incorrect facts by AP’s thousands of client outlets around the world is just incredible.

The March 22 story was reported by an AP staffer under condition of anonymity.

Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

Biography - Nicholas Stix

Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.