Laura Barron-Lopez:
Much of this is a P.R. blitz right now.
And the White House — that includes posts to social media, including from the White House account, an ASMR video which isolates specific audio of a deportation flight that includes the sound of chains. This also — this P.R. blitz includes the fact that the DHS launched a $200 million ad campaign where they are attempting to sell the idea of mass deportations as something that is necessary for public safety.
And in that ad, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem talked straight to the camera, telling people to self-deport immediately. Now, the White House and the Trump administration have repeatedly referred to all undocumented migrants as — quote — “criminals.”
But that’s not accurate, Amna, because many of the people that are being deported are not criminals. They have no criminal history or record. And a growing number — that includes a growing number of those being deported.
And I spoke to Danny Woodward, who is the lawyer representing that 10-year-old girl who is recovering from brain cancer and her family, who were deported to a rural part of Mexico last month. And he told me what happened, that, on February 3, that 10-year-old U.S. citizen girl woke up feeling dizzy, her head was hurting, and that her parents wanted to rush her to the hospital that had been treating her in Houston.
Her parents are Mexican nationals. They’re undocumented. They had made this trip many times before, but this time they were stopped by CBP. And despite the fact that they repeatedly told officers that their daughter was a U.S. citizen, they had hospital documentation, that many of their other children in the car with them were also U.S. citizens, that was not taken into account at all, and they were ultimately deported to what is considered a pretty dangerous part of rural Mexico.
And we should also note, Amna, that those parents have no criminal record as well. So, again, despite a lot of the claims made by the administration that many of these are public safety threats, the deportation numbers suggest otherwise.
