This is a link to an opinion column attributed to former governor Jan Brewer published in the Arizona Capitol Times.
The core of the column is an attempt to put lipstick on the disastrous Trump administration border policies that have created the very real humanitarian crisis. Those are the same policies that have resulted in children being taken away from their parents and unbelievably “lost” somewhere in the Trump bureaucracy where expertise and experience don’t seem to be valued.
Mrs. Brewer’s column wrongly states that there has been a 1,700% increase in those seeking asylum in the United States with 80% trying to pull a fast one in order to sneak into the country with false claims. This is the response I sent to the newspaper:
It’s a funny thing about source citations; when you actually follow the citation links you may find that the meaning of that original source has been twisted to satisfy an agenda. In this case, the former governor tries to support another one of Donald Trump’s immigration “alternative fact” claims with a citation from a June 2018 “PolitiFact” article.
But the article doesn’t support the sinister implication suggested by Mrs. Brewer. To coin a phrase, here’s the “rest of the story” from the same article:
“There was a 1,675 percent increase in asylum claims reviewed by the Homeland Security Department from 2008 to 2017. But that does not evidence fraud, as Trump suggested. Record levels of violence and persecution abroad largely explain the rise in asylum claims, experts told us.”
In all fairness, I don’t intend to suggest that Mrs. Brewer has tried to deliberately mislead.
Actually, I doubt very much whether she read the original source citations in her column. It reads like something written by a so-called conservative “think tank,’ and then shopped around to Trump sympathizers who, in turn, use their assumed credibility to get the article published.
