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The Department of Homeland Securty is obviously biased in favor of themselves, but just like the media lying, you'd expect any factual statements they make to be correct. If they say that the guy has been previously arrested for assault, then you can bet that the guy has actually been previously arrested for assault. If that was a lie, then first of all the left would pounce on that and tell everyone that it's a lie, and second, the DHS would know this and not lie in the first place. If it's truthful, the left would be silent about it.
If the DHS had instead posted "Chicago residents say the man had been arrested for assault" you would be right to be skeptical.
Except we recently had a government that literally lied on the facts - the Hunter Biden Laptop story is one such situation.
I suppose it's a "Government can only lie on the facts when they have a favorable media environment?"
I'm honestly trying to figure out for myself why I trust the DHS accounts when I would typically try to verify the information in other ways.
One reason to treat these claims differently is that the people making them physically changed because we had an election in 2024.
The Biden Laptop story was hushed up during Trump 1.
The security state officers that lied about Hunter's Laptop are enemies of Trump.
While it's useful to speak of "the government" lying, this is an abstraction. A government is made up of people. And it's unremarkable to trust some people over others. The people running DHS are not the people who lied about Hunter's Laptop. It's totally consistent to trust the one and not the other.
So the 2024 election counts as a physical change in personnel, and since Trump purged his enemies, you can totally trust DHS.
But the 2016 one didn’t, because…?
Please state directly what you are implying without putting implications in my mouth.
I think you only trust DHS because they’re more obviously polishing Trump’s knob. I think “we had an election” is an excuse, because this is a stupid way to establish trust.
I live in Washington DC and physically know the people running DHS Comms. These are not the people who were running DHS a year ago. It’s entirely rational for me to trust different people differently.
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If there's one thing that Trump was notoriously awful about that even a lot of his die-hard supporters would agree on, it was staffing the executive branch with people who wouldn't try to undermine his interests back in his first term. He has clearly learned a lot from the experience and that's why there have been far fewer issues with him getting backstabbed by bureaucrats and his own appointees this time around.
I do actually think this is true.
It also makes “we had an election” into a fig leaf.
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Like the media rarely lying, the government rarely lies. This was one of the rarelys. But even with a media that was mostly friendly to the government, there were significant sources questioning the government. If the DHS was lying here, the media would be going through the DHS's claims one by one and talking about how each one is a lie. The fact that that hasn't happened is a good sign that the DHS is telling the truth.
Also, the Hunter Biden laptop is one story. It would not be possible for the government to keep up a series of lies, one for every single immigrant arrest story.
It would if no one was questioning them.
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You probably shouldn't. However, I have tried to verify some of these other ways (though only those available to a keyboard warrior, I'm not doing investigative reporting). Most of them are basically inconclusive; there are atrocities claimed that have no evidence for them, and DHS says the situation is some other way which also cannot be confirmed. Very often the "atrocity" side is making highly emotive claims that aren't even really atrocities if you turn on your brain for a second or so -- for instance, it's not an atrocity that they're arresting illegal aliens outside a car wash when they don't have a warrant to search inside. It's not an atrocity for them to detain illegal aliens with no criminal record. It's not even an atrocity for them to temporarily detain US citizens who get in the way when they're doing a raid, though this may be justified or not depending on the details (which are not available). It's certainly not an atrocity to drive an arrestee's car away with the arrestee's toddler child in the car -- what are they going to do, leave the kid alone? It's not an atrocity to chase a suspect who then runs into a daycare, nor to arrest the suspect there. But all these claims are presented with a spin that makes them sound like accusations of misconduct, and that makes me mistrust those sources.
Then there's the claims that really are bad -- for instance, the runner with the six broken ribs, supposedly backed up by a "shocking" video. But the "shocking" video just shows the runner after he's been arrested. We not only don't know if he did anything to deserve arrest, we have no idea if he's actually got "six broken ribs". All we have is stories repeating claims made by activists as if they are true. The fact that the video is claimed/implied to have the shocking details but does not works against their credibility. And if I was to believe that kind of thing, I'd have to believe that DHS deported an Allentown grandfather from Chile to Guatemala when he went in to get his green card renewed, a story that made The Guardian among other places, and from thence here. As you may recall, the gentleman named had passed away -- in Santiago -- in 2019. DHSs response to this story while it was happening was basically "¿Qué? ¿Quién?", until they said they'd found records and the guy had been to the US only once, on visa waiver, without incident, some years ago.
So, if you don't trust the government much it's fair to view DHSs statements with skepticism. But the statements from the other side should, IMO, be viewed with far more skepticism, due to their record. That works out to at least tentatively believing DHS when there's no good evidence either way.
Of course, if the police department of Kenosha had made a statement after the Rittenhouse incident that Rittenhouse had unlawfully crossed state lines with a rifle and shot three black men without provocation, I suspect most of Red Tribe would believe them at least at first. They really are generally credulous of law enforcement, with some exceptions (ATF and FBI in particular)
I'm not even convinced of this. Things like "this man is wanted for assault" and "was wielding a hammer and threw rocks" are things that could be verified. Maybe not immediately, but they can.
Of course, this factor is probably more important. The anti-immigrant side of these stories is obviously mostly or all spin even without having to decide whether the government was lying.
By the time they can be verified, everyone's forgotten about that story and the next several atrocities have been claimed.
A lie can get halfway round el mundo before the truth can get its pantalones on
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