Tag: deportations
Rupert Murdoch

Amid Fox Election Scandal, Rising Calls On Twitter To Deport Rupert Murdoch

Days after a newly filed court brief unveiled, in painstaking detail, the duplicity of the Fox News network's coverage of the 2020 presidential election, calls have grown for its billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch, to be deported.

Twitter users blasted Murdoch over the weekend after Dominion Voting Systems' bombshell brief Thursday showed the media mogul, along with his star hosts and executives at the right-wing network, broadcast baseless election fraud allegations they privately acknowledged weren't true.

According to Dominion, Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity repeatedly ridiculed then-President Donald Trump and his allies for alleging without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen — false charges the hosts simultaneously peddled on air at the time.

As of Sunday, neither Fox nor the New York Post — two arms of Murdoch's media empire — had reported on the damning revelation. On Friday, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal branded Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit a "case [that] primarily centers on false theories pushed on Fox programs by associates of [Trump]." The report named Carlson and Ingraham twice and glossed over Hannity altogether.

What all three news outlets have done in copious amounts since President Joe Biden took office, however, is rail against his administration's immigration policies.

Anti-Immigration Trio

Fox, for example, has published over 40 reports on "border security" since Monday, February 13, a search on its website for the keyword showed.

In one of his late-night shows last July, Carlson blasted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This decades-old federal law eliminated a quota system limiting the number of people from a nation who could migrate to the United States.

Ranting about a George Soros-linked organization he said was "helping young border crossers avoid deportation," Carlson asked, "Why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally?"

"Actually, Tucker, the bigger question is whether or not you remember who signs your paychecks," Rolling Stone's Kat Bouza wrote at the time.


Carlson's boss, Murdoch, is an Australian-born entrepreneur. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 to bypass an American law that barred foreign nationals from owning more than 20 percent of an American broadcasting license.

Murdoch and Carlson secretly ridiculed Trump's voter fraud claims, which hit the airwaves even before election night was over, the New York Times reported Thursday.

Ratings Over Facts

In private communications, Carlson called Trump, the peddler-in-chief of the Big Lie, a "demonic force who excels at "destroying things."

"He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong," Carlson wrote, according to TheGuardian.

“Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear, ” Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott after watching an unhinged press conference by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell on November 19, 2020.

Murdoch, text messages in Dominion's filing further showed, thought the fraud allegations were "really crazy stuff" and that it would be “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere," reported the Washington Post.

Ingraham called Powell "a complete nut," while Carlson branded the "Kraken" attorney an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell.”

Other top executives of the network shared Murdoch's view of the false fraud claims but, like their colleagues, kept mum about the truth for fear of losing viewers to nascent far-right news channels publicly endorsing the baseless claims of fraud.

Bill Sammon, the network's Washington bureau chief at the time, privately remarked on Fox's 2020 election coverage, writing, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

In a brief filed Thursday, Fox said Dominion had “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context" to buttress what it said was the voting machine maker's flawed view of defamation law.

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech," the network said.

'Denaturalize And Forcibly Deport'

The revelation has, nevertheless, spurred calls for the U.S. government to deal Murdoch the same hand that his news organizations have advocated for other less-powerful immigrants.

"Denaturalize and forcibly deport: [Rupert Murdoch]. §1481.(7) ...violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States," a Twitter user wrote on Friday.


Several others in the Twitterverse had echoed the call.



child deportation

Trump Administration Rushing Deportations Of Children During Pandemic

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

The girls, 8 and 11, were alone in a rented room in a dangerous Mexican city bordering Texas. Their father had been attacked and abandoned on the side of a road and they didn't know where he was.

For seven months the children had waited with their dad in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, to ask U.S. authorities for asylum. They had fled their home after death threats from local gang members and no help from police. They had also been victims of sexual assault.

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Danziger: The American Nightmare

Danziger: The American Nightmare

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

New Rules, Same Humans

New Rules, Same Humans

On Tuesday morning, less than an hour after U.S. officials deported Guadalupe Olivas Valencia to Mexico, the 45-year-old man leapt to his death from a bridge that connects our two countries.

BBC News reported witnesses describing Olivas as distressed and saying he shouted that he did not want to return to Mexico before he jumped. He was from Sinaloa, one of the most violent states in the country.

If you’re inclined to point to Olivas’ three attempts to live here illegally as evidence of his unwillingness to follow the rules, consider recasting the indictment as a question: Why would this man have tried three times to escape Mexico?

As of Tuesday afternoon, we still knew little about Guadalupe Olivas Valencia beyond the circumstances of his death. But anyone paying attention to the news and capable of even a whisper of empathy knows there is more to his story. It is not difficult to imagine his death as a harbinger of more tragedies to come.

Olivas died on the same day the Department of Homeland Security released sweeping new guidelines that will most likely target for deportation millions more undocumented immigrants living in the United States. No matter how much they pay in taxes and Social Security and regardless of what they contribute to their communities, they are now more vulnerable. Something as simple as failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign can lead to one person’s deportation and the devastation of an entire family.

When I read about Olivas’ suicide, I immediately thought of another family of immigrants I wrote about in December 2010. The parents — I called them Mary and Joe to protect their identities — and their two elder children were born in Mexico. They fled for their lives, crossing the border illegally and then paying strangers $6,000 to ride in windowless vans from Arizona to a small town in northeast Ohio. They found full-time work and brought three more children into the world.

They lived in constant fear of discovery, but they were willing to take the risk to improve the lives of their children — an American value, I was raised to believe.

As I wrote at the time, one foggy evening in 2010, Joe was driving home from work, when police pulled him over for using high-beam headlights. He was gone before his wife and children could even visit him at the police station.

His 11-year-old daughter, Emma, took his deportation the hardest. She was a bright student, but her light burned out in her father’s absence. The longer he was gone the more morose and combative she became. Mary shared her concern in phone calls with her husband, but she was trying to keep her family afloat. One afternoon, Mary left Emma to watch the younger children so that she and her eldest daughter could run errands.

By the time they returned, Emma was gone. She had coiled a cord around her neck and tied it to the banister and then slid down the stairs until she suffocated.

I learned about Emma only after she had died, in an interview with Veronica Isabel Dahlberg, who is a co-founder and the executive director of HOLA, an advocacy group for the large Latino community in northeast Ohio. After reading about Olivas’ suicide on that bridge, I called Dahlberg to see how Emma’s family is doing now.

After his daughter’s suicide, Joe made it back to his family, but only for a while. He was arrested in 2012 after he was pulled over for another traffic infraction. This time, the charge was more serious because he’d already been deported. For months, he languished in a detention cell in Youngstown, awaiting his fate. On the day of his court hearing, Feb. 28, 2013, his wife of 20 years called Dahlberg.

“I could barely understand her at first,” Dahlberg said. “She was so upset.”

Joe had hanged himself in his cell. He was 40 years old.

Days after he died, Joe’s family — including his parents — and friends and colleagues gathered at a local funeral home to say goodbye. His death notice described him as a man who read the Bible every day and who tried to live his life by its teachings.

“His greatest joy,” it read, “came from being with his family.”

He is buried next to his daughter Emma, in the small American town where he once dared to believe that his family would be safe.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate.

IMAGE: Mexican immigration officers talk with a man whom they suspect to be an illegal immigrant during a search operation in Zapopan near Guadalajara, Mexico July 29, 2014. REUTERS/Alejandro Acosta/File Photo