On Monday’s PBS News Hour, co-anchor Amna Nawaz discussed the latest arrest of the media’s favorite Maryland man, illegal immigrant and alleged gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to El Salvador and held in prison there before being ordered returned to the United States:
NAWAZ: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident whose deportation sparked scrutiny of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, was arrested again this morning during a meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Baltimore….Before his arrest, Abrego Garcia spoke to a crowd of reporters.
GARCIA [through interpreter]: To all the families who have suffered separations and who live constantly under the threat of being separated, I want to tell you, even though injustice is hitting us hard, we do not lose faith.
Nawaz was joined by Garcia's attorney and the first question was a typical PBS softball about the figure who has bizarrely yet predictably become a liberal icon: “What can you tell us about where your client is right now and how he and his family are doing?”
Later, Monday political discussion with NPR’s Tamara Keith and pollster Amy Walter also brought up Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants as a cudgel against him (though Nawaz did admit it helped Trump get elected again).
NAWAZ: Well, we know the immigration debate, Tam, obviously was a big part of what helped to propel President Trump back into office. We reported earlier on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is now facing a second deportation, this time to Uganda, a country to which he has no connection. And this one case has become sort of emblematic of the entire Trump administration's approach. But when you look at how people are viewing that approach, there's a new Economist/YouGov poll that shows, on immigration, president has a 43 percent approval rating and a 53 percent disapproval rating. Do those numbers say to you that people feel like he's gone too far?
Keith made an interesting, unwitting admission about how the media emphasizes liberal “sob stories” in its coverage of the illegal immigration crackdown.
You know, when President Trump sat down with Meet the Press with Kristen Welker before he even took office, he talked about his immigration policy and he said that there was a risk that there were going to be stories of families or people that were sob stories that get put on television and those stories are going to affect the perception that people have of his immigration policies. Well, those stories are all over the place now and they are affecting the perception that people have of mass deportation….
What stories aren’t “all over the place” on the legacy networks and PBS news programs? The victims of violent illegal immigrants as PBS News Hour and its weekend counterpart have run zero stories on two victims of illegal immigrant killers, Rachel Morin (raped and murdered in Maryland in 2023) and Jocelyn Nungaray (a 12-year-old sexually assaulted and strangled in Texas in 2024).
PBS has offered nothing thus far on the illegal immigrant truck driver Harjander Singh, who broke a traffic law and caused a collision that killed three in Florida earlier in August.
Another unwitting reference to liberal bias happened in the program’s previous segment in a question from congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins to Rep. Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas.
She asked a question then felt the need to clarify that not all consumers of PBS news products are Democrats (though surely most of them are, consider which groups are rushing to PBS’s defense): “Some Democratic viewers have asked me — we have viewers across the spectrum, but Democrats have asked me, why aren't we seeing more marches, more rallies?”
