The notoriously liberal Orlando Sentinel needs to find some better heroes to star in their sob stories on supposedly unfair migrant deportations under the Trump Administration. The front page of Monday’s paper featured a story reported by Natalia Jaramillo, “A Mix of Hope, Dread -- Cubans in Central Florida feel a change is coming, but concerns about deportations also rise.”
Readers were primed to sympathize for the story's main subject, the native Cuban man on the front page, Julio Varona, who fled Cuba’s communist regime as a teenager but is now set for deportation.
Varona, an opponent of the island’s communist government, filed onto a makeshift raft alongside a handful of others in the 1990s, risking his life and sailing across the waters of the Atlantic Ocean to reinvent his life in Florida.
And readers might have been sympathetic -- until they reached paragraph 15, if they got that far:
Last month the Department of Homeland Security announced 170 Cubans with criminal records had been sent back, marking the first deportations of the year to an island that historically has rejected such deportees. As the situation has evolved, though, the island has become more open to their return.
Varona will likely be on one of those flights next month. In 2000, he was sentenced to 10 years of probation for sexual battery of a minor, but the judge withheld adjudication, meaning he was not formally convicted. He had pleaded not guilty at the time and maintains his innocence now, but in 2001 an immigration judge ordered his removal.
He was released from ICE custody a few months later and checked in with the agency annually, but was never deported in part because Cuba would not take him. Finally in December, following his regular check-in with ICE in Orlando, Varona left the office with an ankle monitor tracking his movement and was told to prepare for deportation in April.
Indeed, Varona is a convicted sexual offender under Florida law who for some reason was not jailed.
Amazingly, the Sentinel also hailed a convicted rapist in another front-page deportation story on November 19, “Sanford grandfather to remain in ICE custody -- Retired optician faces deportation for criminal past.” In that case, the reporter waited seven paragraphs before unleashing the other side of the story: "Several years after the deportation order, he was convicted of rape, in 1972.”
The Sentinel clearly finds these stories of imminent deportation to be sympathetic. But are a pair of convicted sex offenders really the best examples the paper could find?
