Right Wing Watch has devoted a lot of space to debunking false historical claims made by Wallbuilders’ David Barton and his son Tim, because their bogus Christian nationalist history has been widely embraced by conservative Americans and politicians to justify the imposition of anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, and Christian nationalist policies.
A video posted Wednesday, in which the Bartons defend President Donald Trump's power to send federal troops into Los Angeles, demonstrates the extent to which their propaganda is often demonstrably untrue.
Tim Barton touted the administration’s claims that its immigration enforcement actions are targeting “violent criminal illegal aliens.” His father agreed. “They’re not going in and making these huge sweeps or taking everybody they see,” David Barton asserted, “They’re after criminals and that’s the people they’ve been going after.”
In reality, what sparked the current protests in Los Angeles was ICE making “huge sweeps” of non-violent, non-criminal people in order to satisfy demands for higher deportation numbers from Trump’s anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller. ICE has been rounding up people at Home Depot, schools, and churches.
They’ve even been grabbing people who were following all the rules and showing up for scheduled appointments about their legal status, and not just in California.
Here’s what Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, a Republican and founder of Latinas for Trump, had to say about ICE’s raids:
This is not what we voted for… I understand the importance of deporting criminal aliens, but what we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings — in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims, all driven by a Miller-like desire to satisfy a self-fabricated deportation goal. This undermines the sense of fairness and justice that the American people value.
