Media Blames Trump for Obama-era Detainment of U.S. Citizen

Peter D'Abrosca   |  

Aug 21, 2018

The mainstream press is at it again – using oversimplified headlines and omitting critical facts to insinuate that President Donald J. Trump is responsible for the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainment of an American citizen.

The dishonest media would have one believe that President Donald J. Trump threw a U.S. Citizen into ICE detention intentionally and maliciously, and left him there to rot.

Conveniently missing from the story is the fact the original mistake was made under the Obama administration. Jaen was actually thrown into ICE detention in May of 2016, about the time when the mainstream press was saying that Trump’s chances of winning the presidency were slim to none.

The Hill completely left that out of their story.  BuzzFeed, who originally wrote the story, was slightly more charitable.

“It’s also a window into the US immigration system, which advocates say was unnecessarily inhumane and complicated even before Donald Trump became president,” they said.

In the interest of accuracy, the following is the full account.

Levy Jaen, 46, came to America on a visa after being born in Panama, where his mother had an affair with a man who was not his biological father. The family lived permanently in Brooklyn at the time. His father eventually became a legal U.S. citizen, and stayed with his mother despite the affair. Since Jaen’s birth certificate lists a non-U.S. citizen as his biological father, his mother is not a U.S. Citizen either, and he was born outside the Unite States, there were questions surrounding his citizenship.

The questions arose after Jaen was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison for his second drug offense. When his sentence expired, he was turned over to ICE detention and ordered deported – by President Barack H. Obama’s ICE in May of 2016.

This is not a cut-and-dry case. The fact that Jaen is biologically unrelated to his father and was actually born to two non-U.S. citizens outside of the country raised a legitimate question for the courts to sort out. Is he actually a citizen? So Jaen waited for two years in ICE detention while the bloated federal government figured out what to do.

Finally, in April, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Jaen was indeed a citizen, and he was released.

“This presumption has reflected the traditional ‘aversion to declaring children illegitimate,’ as well as an interest in promoting familial tranquillity through deference to the marital family,” the court said in its opinion.

The complete backstory, though, is lost on the average reader – and that is just the way the mainstream press wanted it. The entire story is meant to demonize ICE, and by extension, Trump.

“Remember, you can trust ICE. They would never detain an American citizen for two years,” wrote nearly-irrelevant #NeverTrump commentator Greg Doucette.

This story perfectly epitomizes the way fake news works. Most of the time, as long as one avoids CNN, the mainstream press is not outright lying. Instead, it purposefully adds and omits fact to shape a narrative.