After a disgraceful front-page smear against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this month, (Actual headline: “Ron DeSantis Is a Veteran. So Are 7 Inmates He's Sending to Execution”) the Orlando Sentinel has continued to use that valuable space to place ridiculous stories involving ICE and immigration, running three sob stories on its front page over a span of eight days.
The Orlando Sentinel’s November 19 front-page headline, “Sanford grandfather to remain in ICE custody -- Retired optician faces deportation for criminal past.”
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But there’s a little more to the story (by Jeffrey Schweers, who regularly files anti-DeSantis hit jobs for the paper) as DeSantis himself, with an assist from Executive Office communications staffer Christina Pushaw pointed out on X: “Good grief the legacy media is shilling for a convicted rapist. That is your sob story?”
Bojerski, born to Polish parents in a displacement camp in war-torn Germany in 1946, came to the U.S. with his family in 1952 where they were granted lawful permanent residency.
Not until paragraph seven do we learn this detail:
He was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Oct. 30 and sent to Alligator Alcatraz, based on a deportation order issued over 50 years ago that U.S. immigration authorities failed to act on. The order was issued after Bojerski’s conviction for larceny and accepting stolen goods in the 1960s. Several years after the deportation order, he was convicted of rape, in 1972.
That part of the story is only told in the last two paragraphs of the 18-paragraph story, paired with an excuse from Bojerski, who “didn’t take a plea deal because he believed he did nothing wrong, [his wife] said.”
Three days before, the Sentinel squeezed in anti-ICE jab in a wholly unrelated Sunday front-page story about teenagers killed in a car crash: “Apopka grieves Apopka Community, already roiled by ICE raids, mourns teens killed in crash.” Reporter Natalia Jaramillo interspersed details about the tragedy with immigration raids as if they were somehow connected.
….a tragic crash took his life and the lives of Enrique Rodriguez Sabas, 17, and Leyner Velasquez, 13, upending a tight-knit immigrant community already enduring immigration raids that are splitting up families….
….Apopka, home to one of the state’s largest communities of farmworkers, has been a major target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration began early this year, she said, leading families there to cement a stronger bond than before.
“The sense of unity and empathy has grown more and more because they’re attacking us a thousand different ways, and now with these losses it has more impact,” Ramirez said.
The family of Leyner Velasquez, the youngest victim, was already reeling from a traffic stop in January that led to his father’s arrest and a three-month detention by ICE.
Monday’s front page included a story syndicated from the New York Times, “Under Trump, Immigrants Are More Fearful but Determined to Stay, Poll Finds.” The poll mixes illegal immigrants with those here legally, sometimes breaking those numbers out but sometimes not, which renders the results confusing.
As the Trump administration seeks to remake the immigration system and deports tens of thousands of people, many immigrants are more scared about living in the United States, and yet their resolve to remain here is largely unchanged.
A new national survey of immigrants in the country — both documented and in the country illegally, and varying widely in how and when they arrived — found that about half of all immigrants say they feel less safe since President Donald Trump took office. The survey was done by The New York Times and KFF, a nonprofit that conducts polling and research about health policy.
The Sentinel’s front-page choices on the death penalty and illegal immigration prove their knee-jerk resistance to conservatives and conservative policies, both state and local.
