New York Times reporter Vivian Yee, who got emotional on a February front page over the plight of “undocumented” immigrants (no surprise, given the paper’s support for amnesty for illegals), on Monday penned a surprisingly sympathetic view of distraught Americans who have lost loved ones to illegal immigrants and came to support Donald Trump for that one reason, loyalty that Trump has returned in kind.
Yee’s story on Monday’s front page, “From Deep Grief, a Solid Bond With Trump on Border Policy,” rather shockingly gave those bereft families much of the same kind of soft and glowing coverage that the paper usually reserves for illegal immigrants like “The Dreamers” and other favored targets of “persecution.”
The families could reel off all the times they had called the media and written to Washington, but after all that trying, they had never heard anyone who mattered. The families could reel off all the times they had called the media and written to Washington, but after all that trying, they had never heard anyone who mattered say anything like it: Most Mexican immigrants, Donald J. Trump declared in his first campaign speech, were “rapists” who were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” across the border.
Now he had come to meet them, the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants, and they wanted to tell him he was right.
One son had been struck by a truck, another shot just around the corner from home. Different causes of death, but the driver, the gunman, all the perpetrators were the same, the parents said: people who never should have been in the country in the first place.
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Hailed for bravery, accused of racism, scorned as puppets, these are some of Mr. Trump’s most potent surrogates, the people whose private anguish has formed the emotional cornerstone of his crusade against illegal immigration and clouded the futures of America’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants.
Their alliance came down to this: To parents parched for understanding, Mr. Trump was a gulp of hope. The Trump campaign flew them to speak at rallies and at the Republican National Convention, put them up in Trump hotels and kept in touch with regular phone calls and messages. After his victory, Mr. Trump invited at least one to the Inaugural Ball and seated three more with the first lady during his first address to Congress.
Then and since, they have defended him on social media and in the press, assuring the world that, with President Trump in office, their children will not have died in vain.
Yee talked to Sabine Durden, whose son was killed in a road collision by an illegal from Guatemala who had two DUIs but had been released on bail and never deported:
At his sentencing in 2013, Mr. Tzun blamed God for the crash. Ms. Durden blamed the immigration system.
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Ms. Durden, 59, had come to the United States from Germany when she married an American in the Army, eventually becoming a citizen. He was a Democrat, so she was a Democrat. She had never thought much about the immigration debate before Dominic died. Now it was her whole life.
Then came Mr. Trump. Whenever she saw him, he greeted her with a “great big hug,” she recalled. “Dom’s mom,” he called her.
“He would say, ‘You’ll never be alone again. You’ll never have to fight this alone,’” said Ms. Durden, who went on to speak at three of his rallies.
Yee suggested the issue was truly a campaign turning point for many voters who wouldn’t normally be considered in the Trump tank.
The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was out there talking about the need to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When Ms. Durden heard that, she changed her voter registration to Republican the same day.
In a series of recent interviews, the families described a similar trajectory: The death of a loved one. The spasm of realizing that the other driver, or the gunman, was living in the country illegally. The political awakening -- for the Republicans, a hardening toward illegal immigrants; for the Democrats, a quick, grim conversion. The relief, when another “angel mom” or “angel dad” saw them on the news and found them online.
Yee’s article may qualify as one of the most flattering things about Trump to appear in the paper (Michael Kinsley’s odd experiment to “say something nice about Donald Trump” notwithstanding).
Here was the paradox of Donald Trump, unfiltered tycoon who seemed as far away as Fifth Avenue and as close up as the living room TV. Even as a legion of critics warned he was pandering to his fans on the way to betraying them, the alliance he had made with the families felt, to many of them, like an unshakable bond.
The thing was, he paid attention. And he never stopped.
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For the Trump campaign, the private cultivation paid off. In public, the families became some of the campaign’s most compelling witnesses.
They could be picked out by what they carried, the talismans of absence: the T-shirts printed with photographs of the smiling dead. The commemorative buttons. The ashes held close in a locket.
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[Trump] also mentioned the case that, at least on the right, had come to define the dangers of illegal immigration: that of Kathryn Steinle, a 32-year-old woman shot to death on a San Francisco pier in 2015. The suspect was an ex-felon from Mexico who had been deported five times. A few months before Ms. Steinle’s death, the local authorities had released him from jail without notifying federal immigration agents.
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Still, those who appeared on the campaign’s behalf said they had never felt like props. Mr. Trump was no more using them, they said, than Mrs. Clinton was using hardworking Hispanic families to humanize the issue.
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It looked very different to the other side, of course. People on social media, and even some friends, did not hesitate to let them know that they thought they were being used. Lots of people called them racist. They insisted that they were not, emphasizing that they did not think all undocumented immigrants were bad.
A large body of research, accumulated over many years, has found that immigrants are less likely than native-born citizens to commit serious crimes or to be imprisoned.
For the families, such studies were beside the point. To them, illegal immigration was an epidemic of preventable deaths.
