The Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 spawned a series of hate crime hoaxes designed to make racism seem worse than it was. Now, we are seeing a surge in deportation hoaxes, as activists and politicians do all they can to keep criminal illegal immigrants from being deported.
This new trend appears to have started in Los Angeles, with Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderon. An attorney representing her family held a press conference on June 30 to declare that masked men had kidnapped Calderon in an unmarked van on her way to work. She was allegedly presented with self-deportation paperwork and then sent to a warehouse after demanding to speak to an attorney. Her family asked for $4,500 in a GoFundMe campaign.
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But a video from the location of the alleged kidnapping and phone records show this was “fabricated,” according to the Justice Department. Investigators believe she went as far as to fake photos of her “rescue” from the kidnappers to explain why she was found at a shopping center in Bakersfield while “still purportedly missing.” She faces up to five years in federal prison for each of her two charges.
If you don’t recall, this hoax was promoted by none other than Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. “No hearing. Just fear,” Bass posted on X, endeavoring to delegitimize Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in her city.
Bass is not the only politician to hop on this trend. In Fresno, the fifth-largest city in California, Democratic City Councilman Miguel Arias claimed there was a scheduled ICE raid at the Cherry Avenue Auction. The raid never happened, and Arias still won’t reveal where he received this faulty information. He instead said that “Blaming the messenger only distracts from the real culprit behind the mass deportation raids.” Vendors are now being financially devastated as attendance at the Cherry Auction still has not recovered. Some are even calling for Arias to resign.
Then there is the latest, weirdest case. An 82-year-old man allegedly died in ICE custody after being arrested at a green card appointment, according to his family. Then the story changed to him being deported to Guatemala, despite being Chilean. But Guatemala has no record of him. Homeland Security does not have anything showing he was detained in Philadelphia or deported, as was claimed. The hospital he was supposedly at in Guatemala has no record of him either.
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Chile does have records of a man with the same name and date of birth. He died there in 2019.
This seems to be the natural evolution from the deluge of stories about “Maryland fathers” being deported, only for it to be revealed that they have criminal records. Democrats and activists are having a hard time finding people whom these raids have actually wronged, and so they are now fabricating deportation stories and “scheduled” raids to make immigration enforcement agents look worse and to make everything seem more chaotic than it is. Every one of these stories, especially those coming from family members, should be treated with skepticism, and every Democratic politician who jumps on them to spin their narrative is guilty of spreading disinformation.