2018.07.06 MAVNI Military Recruits
💩 The AP ran a grotesquely distorted story and headline, "US Army quietly discharging immigrant recruits" and it was a poorly written article about how 40-500 immigrant enlisted had been let go, but it leaves all sort of implications that the Trump administration is persecuting minorities in the military. And of course the left was outraged and triggered (as always) and it was re-printed, re-linked, or a couple dozen OpEds came out, each more extreme than that last, about how this racist persecution of immigrants was hunting down good troops and throwing them out because Trump is a Nazi. Of course the truth is quite different, Trump reversed the Obama era program, and virtually none has retracted or corrected the Big Lie.
Then the facts came out debunking a lot of the AP's inferences:
- This program has been around for decades with no evidence that the numbers had increased over the Obama era or prior administrations
- as far as I can tell, none were active military, many were signed up for joining and that opportunity was on hold (or went away) after their background checks
- They really weren't being targeted or singled out, beyond people from bad places had to get scrutiny (some of this started under Obama and the Fort Hood Shooting
- After the Press on this, the Trump administration clarified the policy and things improved -- but it was spun that they stopped throwing them out, not that they reversed an Obama era policy and no correction of the original misleading story (in fact, they often repeated the original claim, but implied they stopped doing it when caught).
What was really happening was people sign up to join the military (at some future date) called deferred enrollment. And this required vetting (meaning basic background checks of what they put on forms), it came to light that many didn't pass that or their security clearances (as had happened for decades), as well as the normal military bureaucratic SNAFU's. So a very small percent (as many as 40 out of 10,000) had not qualified. But that's a high number since that was just a quote from the lawyers in the story, and AP didn't do it's job and verify any of it. To make matters worse, some of the immigrants had been stupid enough to let their Visa's lapse in anticipation of passing their vetting, and so now their immigration status was at risk. That is all.