The progressive media frame that Trump is now deporting two-year-old US citizens is among the more troubling frames yet. Not troubling because it’s true. At best it’s a gross misrepresentation of the situation. No, troubling because of how audacious the misrepresentation is. The argument that Trump deported US citizens is particularly egregious. One has to abandon basic reason to sustain the frame. It’s naked propaganda.
Suppose a German citizen who has lived in the United States for a number of years and while here has a child. Under the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the child enjoys birthright citizenship. The German citizen decides to go home to Germany. Is she going to leave her child in America because the child is an American citizen? It’s hard to imagine that she would. She is the child’s mother. I know if I were to move to another country, I’d take my kids with me.
You might be interested to learn that the child in this scenario is automatically a German citizen because Germany’s nationality law, like most nationality laws, is based on descent (jus sanguinis), not place of birth (jus soli). In other words, there is nothing controversial about a German woman living in America returning to her homeland with her two-year-old German child. A German family is going home to Germany—their language, their culture, their nation.
The same thing holds if this were a case of deportation. Suppose, for whatever reason, the German citizen is deported to Germany. She’s wants her child to be with her. Her child is a German citizen to boot. So naturally the child goes with her. The government isn’t “deporting a two-year-old American citizen.” The government is deporting a German citizen who is taking her German child back with her to Germany.
My hypothetical is identical to the case of the Honduran citizen with the two-year-old Honduran child born in America. The woman is being deported. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asks her if she wants the child to go home with her or have the child placed with another family. She wants to take the child home with her to Honduras. After all, like Germany, Honduras reckons citizenship by descent, therefore the child is a Honduran citizen. A Honduran family goes home to Honduras—their language, their culture, their nation.
Obviously the Honduran woman did not have a legitimate claim to asylum. True, Honduras isn’t the land of opportunity that the United States is (albeit cities like San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa do have areas with a growing middle class), but it’s not an abandoned airstrip on a remote island. You know how progressives rage whenever anybody describes the Third World countries as “shit-hole countries”? Surely progressives aren’t saying that Honduras is a shit-hole country. It sounds like, though.
And what about family separation? Do they want Honduran children staying in America without their mothers? That sounds like a historical desire that Democrats would find repellant (at least based on their rhetoric). Then again, the way things are going, with families increasingly depicted as traditional ways of organizing society best left to the past, who knows. Maybe don’t ask the mother whether she will take her child back with her to Honduras then. Maybe ask the two-year-old child. If she can know her gender identity, then she can know whether she wants to be in Honduras with her mom or in America with God knows who.
What about the cases of Honduran children with cancer? The progressive media are advancing this line, too. Not a big deal for our German citizen in the hypothetical scenario, since Germany has universal health care and, were her child to have cancer, it would be taken care of. But did you know that in Honduras there a thing called the Ministry of Health (SESAL), as well as a thing called the Honduran Social Security Institute (IHSS)? SESAL and (IHSS) provides free healthcare services to Honduran citizens. Guess what else they have in Honduras? Cancer treatment. Not quite the shit-hole country progressives thought it was.
This is a typical feature of propaganda. It’s like showing Trump in a blue suit at the Pope’s funeral and suggesting that blue suits are disrespectful and Trump is the only one in attendance wearing a blue suit. Not only are facts excluded, but the assumption is false. Here we are told that Trump is deporting two-year-old American citizens to God knows where without informing the audience that the children are Honduran citizens whose parents are being deported. When elites control the propaganda apparatus they can make nothing-to-see-here into all-important-things. They take the ordinary and make is extraordinary. It’s like a magic trick. It’s sleight-of-hand.
The propaganda frame makes it sound like ICE is snatching little children riddled with cancer from their parents and sending them off to some totalitarian hellhole. Again, Honduras isn’t paradise (where is paradise?), but it has a functioning democracy and rather forward leaning politics. Xiomara Castro, elected in 2021, is the first female president of Honduras. She’s a member of the Liberal Party. These Honduran kids are going to be fine in Honduras. Will you stop believing in progressive media already?
As an aside (maybe not), you might remember that Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, refused to comply with a Supreme Court order, which led to the 2009 Honduran coup d’état. The day after the army removed him from office, the Honduran Congress impeached him. He deserved it for disobeying the Supreme Court, right? I don’t know. Soon after the coup, US President Barack Obama issued a statement: “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there.”
Put in a pin in that for when Trump refuses to comply with a Supreme Court order (they’re already lying to you by saying he already did) and Congress impeaches him (which is what will happen if folks put Democrats in charge of the House two years from now) and the US Army ousts him. He won’t receive the Zelaya treatment.
freedom and reason 