Suzanne Gamboa of the Associated Press - with help from Traci Carl and Peter Prengaman - offers her version of investigative journalism in "AP IMPACT: Citizens held as illegal immigrants" (link). She says that 55 U.S. citizens have been deported over the past eight years. That's 55 too many, but that's only a infinitesimal fraction of all those who have been deported during that time and bureaucracies have been known to make mistakes and they always will make mistakes occasionally. And, those who are mistakenly deported have the recourse of suing, which is indeed happening in some of the cases she highlights. Many of the problems can no doubt be corrected by tightening up rules and the like.

But, of course, that's not what the article is really all about. What Gamboa and the AP are trying to do is to discourage enforcement of our immigration laws, making us wary of doing any enforcement lest we deport a U.S. citizen by mistake. While we need reporters to be filing stories like this, we have a greater need for them to follow the money on illegal immigration. The AP has never to my knowledge offered such an article but instead has offered hundreds like this one.

The article is thick with immigration lawyers and "immigrant rights groups", with quotes from Bruce Einhorn of Pepperdine University, lawyer Kara Hartzler of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, and another lawyer. The article promotes a study from the Vera Institute for Justice, which is part of the Altus global alliance (altus.org). The latter is funded by the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation (altus.org/altus/about/about.asp?section_id=1&sub_section_id=4&lang=en). One of the leaders of the Justice Strategies group recently mentioned as advocating against the 287g program used to work for Vera.

And, needless to say, the perspective of those charged with enforcing our laws is given short shrift, with most of the space filled with anecdotes designed to pull the reader's heartstrings. Julie Myers is quoted but doesn't say much, and there's this:

Jim Hayes, ICE director of detention and removal, said he is aware of only 10 cases of U.S. citizens detained over the past five years. Even if combined with the cases found by the AP, "that's not an epidemic," Hayes said. He refused to identify any cases, citing privacy laws... He added that agents investigate any claims to U.S. citizenship, but they often turn out to be false. He said U.S. citizens sometimes claim to be foreign-born, and that immigration officials never knowingly hold someone they can "definitively" determine is a citizen.