Long Island’s daily newspaper, Newsday, recently ran a story entitled “ICE TAKEDOWN VIDEO SHOWS LI MAN’S HEAD HITTING WALL.” It suggested that ICE officers callously rammed the head of an illegal alien into a brick wall in the process of detaining him.
They prominently show the still shot of the migrant’s head hitting the wall. But you have to see the whole video to realize what was happening.
First off, this illegal alien was running away from the officers. They caught up with him, but he again resisted. He was dead weight who was unwilling to cooperate with the officers, so they had to drag him.
As they attempted to pick him up and walk with him to be detained, he lost his balance, tripped the officers and veered headfirst into a brick wall. It is quite obvious that this is what happened and it was NOT because the ICE officers pushed him into the wall.
Yet, the article presented a narrative to make it appear that the officers violently threw him against the brick facade. How did the reporter verify this? He quoted the immigrant himself, 35-year-old Isai Santos Caceres of Uniondale, who claims “one of them pushed me and I went into the wall.” This was clearly false, as evidenced by the video.
He gave further credence to the false narrative by quoting the radical group, Islip Forward, which stated on its website that the agents were ‘using an individual’s head as a battering ram into a brick wall.”
This reporter has a pattern of glorifying these radical groups, such as Islip Forward. These are the anti-ICE radicals who alert their team members to try to distract ICE and interfere with their rightful lawful duties of apprehending illegal aliens for deportation.
The reporter wrote that the incident… “has shocked (the immigrant’s) relatives and advocates who say they’ve seen escalating force in encounters on Long Island and elsewhere.”
He poured more fuel on the fire by writing, “The incident on January 5 in Hempstead is part of what advocates called a growing trend of brutality by immigration agents that has provoked shock, outrage, and mass demonstrations across the country.”
It’s perfectly fine for media outlets to editorialize in favor of illegal immigration and against policies that seek to deport those here illegally. We believe they are terribly wrong in adopting this position, but they have a right to do so.
But it is clearly wrong for a reporter to distort the news and try to paint the picture that ICE officers were violently slamming a man’s head into the wall when the full video clearly shows that this is not true.
The article prompted ICE to respond publicly to defend its officers from this distorted narrative.
There are times when ICE, like any law enforcement agency — or any government department for that matter — may overstep protocols. While the shooting of the woman revving her car directly into an officer’s path seemed justified, the killing of a rabble-rouser who was being subdued is certainly deserving of deep investigation and criticism and potential disciplinary action..
Rogue actions should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and not used as an excuse to stop enforcing our immigration laws.
There has to be a cessation of glorifying lawless radicals in the illegal immigration lobby and the spreading of falsehoods about the actions of hard-working ICE officers, who are simply trying to enforce the law, often against people who will resist arrest or attack them violently.