Driving the news: The posters — which read “ARRESTED” — specify various crimes linked to the pictured immigrants and have the White House’s official logo at the bottom.
-The “roughly 100” posters were being placed strategically along “Pebble Beach,” where TV news crews do live shots in front of the mansion. A White House official told Axios the intent is for the posters to be visible behind TV journalists reporting from those positions.
-Posters positioned near the West Wing claim to show unauthorized immigrants arrested for “first-degree murder,” “sexual abuse of a child,” “kidnapping and rape,” “murder,” “rape of a child,” and “distribution of fentanyl.”
-Others claim to show people charged with “sexual assault of minors,” “sexual contact with a child,” and “lewd acts in front of a child.”
-The posters describe the arrestees as “illegal aliens.” Their names and precise legal statuses aren’t included.
The very fact that sexual abuse of a minor is being conflated with immigration shows how far we’ve fallen. This document from the National Institute of Justice shows that the data indicates illegal immigrants have a much lower crime rate than citizens. The issue isn’t that they are immigrants, it’s that they’re criminals. They were presumably committing similar crimes (or at least capable of doing so in Mexico). I’m not any happier knowing that a pedophile is now in Mexico/El Salvador. I want justice and reform. We should always strive for justice and reform. These illegal immigrants aren’t the only ones committing these crimes. As I said earlier: largely, it’s legal citizens committing these crimes. We need to create a system of justice and reform. We need to be able to handle citizens and illegal immigrants.
Obviously this administration would prefer to take every criminal and push them outside of our borders. Like I said, I don’t care if a crime is committed in or out of my borders. I want justice and reform. I want to live in a world where crimes like this are basically non-existent. And I want to live in a world where people with these issues don’t become repeat offenders.
Conflating immigration with these types of crimes is just making it harder for us to address the real issues with our justice and reformation system (lack thereof). Not to mention, we are basically just wasting money and time focusing on illegal immigrant crime when the bigger issue is crime being committed by citizens. It’s like we cut off our arm, but as the arm fell to the ground one of the fingernails broke. So, this administration is spending all of its efforts on fixing the broken fingernail - and failing to patch the profuse loss of blood coming from its shoulder.