Univision, the nation’s leading Hispanic network that has recently been convulsed by severe financial setbacks and major layoffs, continues to provide totally supportive, acritical publicity for organizations that have the elimination of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in their crosshairs.
The latest example occurred when the network’s late night national evening newscast featured the #StopICEcold-supporting Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) in its launch of a new online interactive map called ICEWatch, which is designed to expose, in its words, ICE’s “destructive and unlawful” law enforcement tactics.
Univision anchor Patricia Janiot introduced the tool to her viewers as one that will help “make the undocumented better prepared” evidently to avoid being apprehended by the agency.
PATRICIA JANIOT, ANCHOR, NOTICIERO UNIVISIÓN: With the increase in raids by the Immigration Service, as reported by the Pew Research Center, new tools have also emerged that seek to make the undocumented better prepared. Two organizations joined forces to use the Internet when dealing with raids or arrests. Peggy Carranza tells us about it.
PEGGY CARRANZA, CORRESPONDENT, UNIVISIÓN: With this interactive map, the Immigrant Defense Project Group and the Center for Constitutional Rights hope to show the undocumented where ICE has made nearly 700 raids since 2013 until now, especially in New York.
GHITA SCHWARZ, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: One can click on several parts of the map to see what ICE did in such and such a city and in such and such a city block.
CARRANZA: The interactive platform is called ICEWatch and provides details of the agency's tactics.
The entire report blatantly and uncritically supported the effort to undermine ICE, with correspondent Peggy Carranza avoiding bringing up any critical questions or perspectives about the effort, much less including any voices of U.S. citizens and legal residents in the New York Hispanic community and elsewhere who support ICE's operations in enforcing the country's laws.
As the Immigrant Defense Project’s website clearly states, the organization’s team of attorneys and advocates, “lead strategic communications strategies to secure dignity and justice for all immigrant communities by disrupting narratives that fuel criminalization. As the detention and deportation dragnet has become wider and more brutal than ever, we continue to advance communications campaigns that cut through hateful and inflammatory rhetoric, and lift up the stories of the most-impacted individuals and families”.
Lift up stories like the one in the Univision report that highlights “innocent” Tomás Gregorio, an undocumented Mexican immigrant detained by ICE when they were looking for someone else? Had Gregorio been a legal resident of the United States ICE would not have apprehended him in the first place.
Below is the transcript of the entire above-referenced report, as aired July 24, 2018 on Univision’s late-night national evening newscast, Noticiero Univisión Edición Nocturna.
PATRICIA JAINOT, ANCHOR, NOTICIERO UNIVISIÓN: With the increase in raids by the Immigration Service, as reported by the Pew Research Center, new tools have also emerged that seek to make the undocumented better prepared. Two organizations joined forces to use the Internet when dealing with raids or arrests. Peggy Carranza tells us about it.
PEGGY CARRANZA, CORRESPONDENT, UNIVISIÓN : With this interactive map, the Immigrant Defense Project Group and the Center for Constitutional Rights hope to show the undocumented where ICE has made nearly 700 raids since 2013 until now, especially new York.
GHITA SCHWARZ, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: One can click on several parts of the map to see what Ice did in such and such a city and in such and such a city block.
CARRANZA: The interactive platform is called Ice Watch and provides details of the agency's tactics. According to the map, the most relevant are, entrance to a home without a warrant, use of alleged deceits to enter a house, use of force and vigilance, increased raids in courts and increased collateral arrests, as was the case of the Mexican Tomás Gregorio, detained by Ice when they were looking for someone else.
OFELIA BRITO, DETAINEE´S COUSIN: It's unfair that when they try to find a person and they don't find who they're looking for them, they take innocent people who don't even have anything to do with that person they were looking for.
CARRANZA: Those who are interested in looking at the interactive map can go to the Immigrant Defense Project group website, known in English as the Immigrant Defense Project. In New York City, Peggy Carranza, Univision.
