If you can take a group of poor people, hiding in the streets, and spin them into dangerous criminals, its going to go a long ways toward justifying your rounding them up and deporting them.
Just take that guy in the small shack down the street -- the one working by the sweat of his brow to support his young wife and child -- and persuade folks to believe he is the town's next rapist.
They'll be running from him and begging ICE to put him on the next train out of town.
So, just doctor the figures a little. You can find a criminal in any group of people. When you find a criminal, all you have to do is hold him up as an example and cry how the whole bunch of them are just as bad.
Realizing this type of misrepresentation is common, notice how a federal ICE spokesperson just quit in protest for being asked to spread falsehoods about the immigrants. James Schwab, of the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco, resigned, saying he was being asked to give out wrongful information.
Here's how this came down: The mayor of Oakland got wind of ICE's plans to make a raid, so she warned the people. When the U.S. Attorney General's office heard what she had done, acting ICE Director Thomas Homan said, "There's over 800 significant public safety threat criminals . . . that we are unable to locate because of that warning, so that community's a lot less safe than it would've been." (This quote taken from a Fox News story.)
Enter James Schwab, the ICE spokesperson in San Francisco. "We are never going to pick up that many people," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "To say that 100 percent are dangerous criminals on the street, or that those people weren't picked up because of the misguided actions of the mayor, is just wrong."
Schwab's resigning in protest underscores what is going on, how innocent, harmless pheasants (if I can use the term) are being spun into dangerous criminals in order to make us feel good about deporting them.
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