Another Liberal Media Hoax on ICE Has Been Debunked
The list is getting long...
Another day, another liberal media hoax on ICE debunked. This time, it was the case of the Irish national Seamus Culleton, a husband and small business owner who was arrested by ICE despite being married to a U.S. citizen and having a “valid work permit” and despite having no criminal record, “not even a parking ticket,” as the media kept telling us.
Well—no criminal record here, anyway.
From the get go, the reports assiduously left out that Culleton overstayed a 90-day visa from 2009, which he got under the Visa Waiver Program. Beneficiaries of the program waive any right to contest their removal (other than on the grounds of asylum, which Culleton isn’t claiming) if they overstay, which Culleton did—for 16 years. He finally applied for a green card last year after getting married, during which process he was issued a work permit. But he was arrested by ICE and issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on September 10 on the grounds that he violated the terms of the Visa Waiver Program.
It’s a pretty cut and dry case, though Culleton seems intent on fighting it, which is why he has been in an ICE detention center for five months. The media has lamented his “imprisonment” in the “absolute hell” of ICE detention. Culleton himself called his detention akin to “a modern day concentration camp.”
Really? A concentration camp?
ICE detention is voluntary. Every person in ICE detention can choose to leave immediately—indeed, the Trump administration will literally pay them thousands of dollars to do so (somehow, I don’t remember any stories about the Nazis offering Jews $2,600 to leave Auschwitz). They just can’t leave to go back into the country they broke into.
Why is Mr. Culleton so eager to stay in a concentration camp? He has cited his wife and business in Boston. Fair enough. But it turns out, when he was granted that visa in 2009 and came to the U.S., he was allegedly facing drug charges back in Ireland.
The Irish Times reported on Thursday that in 2008, Culleton was charged with several offenses related to possession of drugs with intent to sell and obstructing law enforcement in their duties during a search “by throwing 25 ecstasy tablets on the ground.” A bench warrant was issued for his arrest just after he came to the U.S., and a second warrant was issued in September of 2009 relating to a criminal damage charge.
Just one more ICE hoax exposed.
The Seamus Culleton Hoax joins a long list:
There was the case of the “Maryland Man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia who turned out to be a wife-beater and MS13 member.
There were the children who were U.S. citizens that ICE deported—who turned out to be the children of illegal aliens who self-deported and decided not to abandon their children.
There was the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the “activist student leader” at Columbia who was “imprisoned for his speech” who it turned out distributed pro-Hamas literature and lied on his green card application.
There was Liam, the little boy in the blue hat who the media claimed was “used as bait” to ensnare his parents in an ICE raid—who turned out to be a child abandoned by both his mother and his father on the freezing streets of Minneapolis and taken in by ICE.
There have been countless stories about people “languishing in ICE detention” that fail to mention that ICE detention is voluntary. “As pathways to freedom have narrowed in immigration courts across the United States, a record number of detainees are giving up their cases and voluntarily leaving the country,” bemoaned CBS News.
“Pathways to freedom”? Really? Every person in ICE detention is free to leave. They are free to go home.
What’s actually happening is people who came here as economic migrants who were instructed by the cartels to claim asylum in order to be allowed to stay are giving up on their false asylum claims and going home to the countries where they are citizens. And no matter how hard the media tries to turn this into the great civil rights cause of our time, the truth keeps getting in the way.
Thank you Batya. Please keep up your good work. The more that people understand that the legacy media is lying to them, the better it will be for us all. So much unnecessary division in society could be entirely avoided if only the media stopped trying to manipulate us all the time and reported all the facts, not just the ones that suit a narrative.
All of the above is precisely why whatever the latest Dem “outrage” is it should never be taken @ face value; there’s the spin/meme they - & the media - are pushing & then there’s the truth.
History proves they have no interest in the latter.