Janet Murguia

The New York Times promoted the "DREAM Act" on Saturday with a Julia Preston article that never located a single lobbyist for stricter immigration enforcement. Instead, Preston assisted in publicizing a major administration push: "Five cabinet secretaries have made calls, held news conferences or blogged on the issue." It didn't matter how ridiculous it sounded to border enforcers: 

On a call organized by the White House on Friday, David Aguilar, the deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said that strict eligibility requirements in the bill for young immigrants who are here would dissuade others outside the country from trying coming to the country illegally. Addressing concerns from lawmakers who say they want more border security before voting for the legislation, Mr. Aguilar said, “At no point in history has the border been as secure as it is today.”

The New York Times maintained its usual labeling slant in its coverage of Arizona's new immigration law in Friday's story by Julia Preston, "Latino Groups Urge Boycott Of Arizona Over New Law."

Several large Latino and civil rights organizations on Thursday announced a business boycott of Arizona, saying that a tough anti-illegal immigration law there would lead to racial profiling and wrongful arrests.

The boycott call was led by the National Council of La Raza, or N.C.L.R., one of the nation's biggest Latino groups, and was joined by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Puerto Rican Coalition. The groups said they would ask members and supporters to refrain from planning conventions or conferences in Arizona and from buying goods produced in the state.

"The law is so extreme, and its proponents appear so immune to an appeal to reason, nothing short of these extraordinary measures is required," Janet Murguía, the president of N.C.L.R., said Thursday at a news conference in Washington.

Speaking of extreme: The unlabeled La Raza is a left-wing Hispanic activist group ("La Raza" stands for "the race,") leaving the group not much room to accuse others of making race-based appeals. And La Raza president Janet Murguia has a disturbingly authoritarian take on her political opponents.

Back in February 2008 she called for opinionators like Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck to be removed from the airwaves because of their "hate speech" against illegal immigrants. (Revealingly, the Times's unquestioning story on the rant failed to place the inflammatory phrase "hate speech" in quotation marks, letting the smear stand as apparent fact.)

On the New York Times's political blog this morning, Ariel Alexovich reported in a very mild tone on a very shocking speech by National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia -- "A Call to End Hate Speech."

By calling to end "hate speech" (an inflammatory phrase the Times doesn't put in quotation marks), Murguia means that anyone harshly criticizing illegal immigrants -- specifically, mainstream opinion-makers like Sean Hannity on FOX News and Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck of CNN -- should be removed from the air waves.

"The head of the country's largest Latino civil rights organization called on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News to stop providing a forum for pundits who consistently disparage the documented and undocumented Hispanic immigrant population.