The media loves hoaxes, and with good reason.
Reality is complex, not usually entertaining, and almost never conforms to the Narrative™.
So we get hoaxes. The Steele Dossier, the “fine people” hoax, Jussie Smollett, the Covington Kids, kidnapped US citizens being sent off to death camps, Nazis and nooses on college campuses…it’s hoaxes all the way down.
A new hoax has recently emerged, adding to the long line of immigration hoaxes. Bonchie, my colleague once-removed over at RedState, dug this one up. I was blissfully unaware of it until it got exposed as yet another hoax.
The story? An 82-year-old man’s daughter claimed that her father had been snatched up by ICE and deported to Guatemala.
On Friday, a local newspaper in Allentown, PA, published a story making a salacious claim against the Trump administration. According to “family members,” ICE had arrested and roughed up their 82-year-old grandfather, a legal asylum holder, before deporting him to Guatemala.
The Morning Call claimed that Luis Leon was trying to replace his lost green card at a local USCIS office when the Chilean national was deported to the wrong country, where he ended up in a hospital recovering from pneumonia. Further, the family said Leon’s wife was kept in custody, in terrible conditions, for 10 hours before being released.
Multiple international news outlets, including The Guardian, ran with the story, giving it an air of credibility, to the point where AI engines like Google and Grok were claiming it was confirmed.
Confirmed! Sounds credible. We do live in a fascist country that kidnaps women and sends them to undisclosed warehouses near the border in order to bully them into self-deporting…not.
ICE agents handcuffed Leon on the spot.
They detained his wife for 10 hours, and then—through a fake “lawyer”—told the family Luis was dead.
No explanation. No due process. Just gone.
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) July 20, 2025
Instead of processing the request, ICE handcuffed him, detained his wife for 10 hours, and later told the family; through a fake “lawyer,” that he was dead.
Turns out, ICE quietly transferred him through a Minnesota detention center and dumped him in Guatemala, a country he has zero ties to. There’s no deportation paperwork, no public record. His family only found him alive after relatives in Chile tracked him to a Guatemalan hospital.
Leon suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart issues. The DOJ is now under fire, but this is the Trump-era immigration machine still in motion—cruel, unaccountable, and lawless.
If they can disappear an elderly, law-abiding U.S. resident…
They can disappear anyone.
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Just the sort of thing that Tom Homan does every day before breakfast.
It would be awful, except that the story was a total hoax. The man was never picked up by ICE, and couldn’t have been. According to Chilean authorities, he has been dead for years.
DHS press release, which calls the story “journalistic malpractice:https://t.co/Z88d3jiT9D
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) July 22, 2025
It appears to have been all made up by the family, which has since gone dark and stopped responding to the press. Here’s what happened since the story first ran in The Morning Call, an Allentown, PA newspaper.
– Records in Chile show a man with his same name and date of birth died in Chile in 2019.
– Guatemala says they have no record of him being deported to their country.
– DHS says there is no record of him appearing at any green card appointment in the Philly area, and they say ICE never arrested him.
– DHS says they never deported him, and their only record of him entering the US is in 2015 from Chile via the visa waiver program, not an asylum grant from the 1980s as the family claimed.
– His granddaughter claimed he was sick in a Guatemalan hospital with pneumonia after ICE deported him, and that he was traumatized (after first claiming he was dead). A doctor at the hospital she claimed he was at says there is no record of him being there.
Link to updated story via the Morning Call, which DHX is calling “another hoax designed to demonize ICE”:
Of course, it was another hoax designed to demonize ICE, and the plan is working. Credulous people are led to believe that ICE is conducting a reign of terror, lefty activists are now taking shots at ICE and Border Patrol agents, and the Democrats think–wrongly–that they have a winning issue.
What does it matter that none of it is true? It FEELS true to them. It confirms their priors. “Journalists” will print the stories. A good time is had by all…leftists.
Who cares if actual ICE agents are getting things thrown at them, doxxed, and shot at? They are members of the hoi polloi–not poor enough to be indentured servants, like the illegal aliens–and not wealthy enough to be members of the elite class. They are disposable proles who likely vote for Republicans, anyway.
Hoaxes are a way of life for the propagandists. Did anybody really believe this story? Did anybody believe Jussie Smollett? Of course not, but it fit their priors perfectly, so they ran with it.
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