As the Supreme Court prepares to hear legal arguments on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program amid President Donald Trump’s efforts to shut it down, the Twitter accounts of CBS News and NBC News repeated, without critique, the president’s inaccurate smear of the program’s recipients as “hardened criminals.”
As DACA goes before the Supreme Court, CBS and NBC push Trump’s lie about Dreamers
“Hardened criminals” cannot receive deferred action on deportation
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published
Trump’s tweet this morning labeling some DACA recipients as “very tough, hardened criminals” follows years of conservative media smearing both immigrants generally and people in the DACA program specifically as criminals, even though the young immigrants who qualify for deferred action cannot have been “convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor or three or more other misdemeanors.” Studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born American citizens, and other data show that people who have applied for DACA protections are far less likely than U.S.-born citizens to have been arrested.
Despite these facts, Twitter accounts belonging to CBS News and NBC News uncritically repeated Trump’s lie:
In contrast to these decisions to amplify Trump’s misinformation just before the Supreme Court hears arguments on this topic, NBC Latino, Yahoo News, and several journalists on Twitter corrected the president’s smear of DACA recipients: