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Justice Dept. Admits Lies Linking Terrorism to Immigration But Won’t Correct Report
You are excused if the headline of this post left your jaw dropped, unable to muster anything but 'WHAT?'
The Justice Department has acknowledged errors and deficiencies in a controversial report issued a year ago that implied a link between terrorism in the United States and immigration....
Released by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the report stated that 402 of 549 individuals — nearly 3 in 4 — convicted of international terrorism charges since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were foreign-born.
The report was written in compliance with Trump’s March 2017 executive order halting immigration from six majority-Muslim countries. Critics immediately expressed alarm at what they considered highly misleading data presented without context. They called it an attempt to misuse law enforcement agencies to advance a political agenda in opposition to immigration....
Several government watchdog and civil liberty groups in May sued the two agencies in two federal courts, seeking a retraction or correction.... the Justice Department has told the groups it will not retract or correct the document. Rather, “in future reports, the department can strive to minimize the potential for misinterpretation."
As described below, the Department of JUSTICE used the wrong data, applied it in the wrong ways, and released a FALSE report.
One flaw the Justice Department acknowledged was the report’s assertion that between 2003 and 2009, immigrants were convicted of 69,929 sex offenses....The nearly 70,000 offenses spanned a period from 1955 to 2010 — 55 years, not six; the data covered arrests, not convictions; and one arrest could be for multiple offenses....
At least 189 of the 549 people convicted were caught up in an investigation with a link to international terrorism but not charged with an offense directly related to terrorism.... that would change the statistics considerably....
Critics also decried the report’s inclusion of eight “illustrative examples” of foreign-born individuals out of a pool of 402 convicted of international terrorism. Six of the eight cases involved people admitted to the country as family members of legal residents or U.S. citizens, which Protect Democracy contended was an effort to portray “chain migration” as a threat.
Our Justice Department who works for us, not Trump or Republicans, refuses to issue any correction since that'd dominate the national news and not align with Trump, Sessions, and the next Attorney General's narrative. They are the criminals, lying to the world by producing false reports and refusing to retract them.