A few days ago, a story was making the rounds on social media alleging an 82-year-old Chilean man died in ICE custody.
Here's the story, shared by MSNBC/Bulwark's Sam Stein:
And here's what the paper, the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported:
Relatives of 82-year-old Allentown resident Luis Leon are headed to a Guatemalan hospital Saturday in hopes of reuniting with the man they say disappeared without a trace into the American immigration system a month ago — and who, for a time, they thought was dead.
The last time anyone in the family saw Leon was June 20, when he went with his wife to a Philadelphia immigration office to have his lost green card replaced.
There, the family says, he was handcuffed by two officers, who led him away without explanation. His wife, who speaks little English, was left behind and kept in the building for 10 hours until she was released to her granddaughter, the family says.
You'll be not surprised to learn this story was a hoax.
The post reads:
It appears to have been all made up by the family, which has since gone dark and stopped responding to the press. Here's what happened since the story first ran in The Morning Call, an Allentown, PA newspaper.
- Records in Chile show a man with his same name and date of birth died in Chile in 2019.
- Guatemala says they have no record of him being deported to their country.
- DHS says there is no record of him appearing at any green card appointment in the Philly area, and they say ICE never arrested him.
- DHS says they never deported him, and their only record of him entering the US is in 2015 from Chile via the visa waiver program, not an asylum grant from the 1980s as the family claimed.
- His granddaughter claimed he was sick in a Guatemalan hospital with pneumonia after ICE deported him, and that he was traumatized (after first claiming he was dead). A doctor at the hospital she claimed he was at says there is no record of him being there.
Link to updated story via the Morning Call, which DHX is calling 'another hoax designed to demonize ICE': http://mcall.com/2025/07/21/luis-leon-allentown-grandfather-story-hoax-ice-says/
The media ran with this story, of course, doing the bare minimum to verify its claims were, in fact, true.
That's putting it mildly.
How nice of them.
And the updated story by the Morning Call currently has 80K views.
Which is the point. The lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.
Of course.
The problem with this is, normal people are eventually going to figure out the game here and ignore these stories outright.
Heh.
Won't be the last, we fear.
They will not get a grip.
And how many retractions have we seen? Not nearly as many.
They're doing more harm to their cause than they realize.
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