The Washington Times Ignored Ben Carson's Plan To Seal The Border In Coverage Of His Latino Outreach Efforts

While chronicling the Latino outreach efforts of their former columnist and current GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, The Washington Times chose to leave out what Carson said about immigration in a speech at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) conference, the largest gathering of its kind.

In its overwhelmingly positive profile of Carson, the Times highlighted the candidate's hope that being the only Republican to speak at NALEO's annual conference would win him Hispanic votes, and underscored his support for a flat tax and repeal of Obamacare.

But the piece left out Carson's actual remarks at the conference, which revealed his desire to “seal the borders” to prevent “somebody from Syria who wants to bomb us” from entering the country. From the 32nd Annual NALEO conference:

[T]he reason that I think that we need to seal our borders, completely, all of our borders -- north, south, east and west -- is not so much because I'm afraid of somebody from Honduras. I'm afraid of somebody from Syria who wants to bomb us, who wants to do bad things. So that's the main reason that we need to seal all of our borders. But in the meantime, we do have an illegal immigration problem that would be solved if you sealed the borders and you ceased the benefits so that people wouldn't see a reason to come here. But what about the 11 million people who are still here, what do you do with them? Well, many of them have never known any other country, so where are you going to send them? So I don't think that that's necessarily a good idea but what we should do, I believe, is provide them a way that they don't have to hide in the shadows, give them an opportunity to become guest workers, they have to register, they have to enroll in a back tax program. And if they want to become citizens, they have to get in the line with everybody else and do what's necessary because we have to pay homage to the people who have done it the right way and not slap them in the face and say we don't care about you. That's not fair either, so we have to do things that are fair to everyone, and if we use that general philosophy, recognizing that the people who came here across the border, they weren't coming here to be Democrats or Republicans they came here to try to improve their quality of life. And we need to understand that, and our policies need to understand that.

The Washington Times has a history of championing Carson; they continued to publish his columns and promote his image in its sister publications even after he made it clear he planned to run for president, while paying him large sums of money for his contributions.