It was barely two weeks ago when Steve Bannon’s Breitbart had to apologize for “mistaking” a German soccer star for a one of the gang members targeting vulnerable African refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean to Europe (and we all know how deeply the site cares about refugee issues). But even after the correction, the site is at it again:
On Tuesday night, Breitbart News presented a photo of MS-13 gang members in El Salvador as if they were DACA recipients in the United States.
The photo of El Salvadoran gangsters appeared at the top of an article about DACA recipients on Breitbart’s website and on its Twitter account. Twitter user @_Almaqah traced the image back to a Getty photo from January 2013 showing gang members gesturing in San Salvador.
The tweet was deleted and the photo accompanying the story was later replaced with a photo of a man in handcuffs.
It’s almost like Breitbart actually has no interest in truth telling or reporting, just an interest in promulgating racist, bullshit propaganda targeting migrants and people of color.
As Think Progress states, the number of DACA recipients involved in or accused of being involved in criminal behavior—key word, accused—is roughly 0.3 percent of the total 800,000 DACA population. This is “extremely low in comparison to the national rate of people with felony convictions (over 8.5 percent) or people who are arrested by age 23 (roughly 30 percent).”
And, as we’ve seen in the past, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a documented history of lying and doctoring evidence in order to falsely tie DACA recipients and immigrant youth to gangs. In the case of one DACA recipient, his attorney called it "one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct I have come across in over 40 years of practice."