Bert Roughton, Senior Managing Editor, and senior editorial director of the liberal Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper. Photo: MyAJC.com

AJC leaves off compelling facts in weeper on the end of TPS for El Salvador

Senior Managing Editor, Bert Roughton, calls it “newspapering”

The AJC gave us another grab-the-tissue story on President Trump’s recent announcement of the end of TPS for citizens of El Salvador the other day.

“José Fermán sat in the Atlanta offices of the El Salvadoran consulate, overwhelmed with a sense of pressure, sadness and fear. All playing out on his tear-stained face.”

That Ernie Suggs weeper again failed to match the AJC slogan of “Credible. Compelling. Complete.”

Because it wasn’t complete. The acronym TPS stands for “Temporary Protective Status.” The editors apparently didn’t think the headline over the yarn about a Salvadoran who has been in the United States since 2009 and who had obtained TPS status after the 2001 earthquake in his homeland should give away too much. They titled it “We’ve helped the country, says Salvadoran of losing protective status.”

Note they left off the “temporary” part of TPS. Too much information can ruin a perfectly good ‘Agenda R Us’ piece.

TPS was granted to Salvadorans – here legally or not – because it was deemed too dangerous to return there after the afore mentioned earthquake. The AJC editors forgot to tell readers that many if not most of the Salvadorans here when the earthquake hit there were illegal aliens.

Let’s let the New York Times (!) explain part of that fact in their own report:

“Salvadorans were by far the largest group of foreigners benefiting from temporary protected status, which shielded them from deportation if they had arrived in the United States illegally.”

The victim of borders and TPS termination, José Fermán, featured in the AJC story has apparently been here since 2009. Suggs didn’t delve into his immigration status before TPS. We think we know why.

He also didn’t mention the Migration Policy Institute estimates: in the 2010-14 period, approximately 1.7 million Central American unauthorized immigrants resided in the United States, with El Salvador sending us 465,000 of them.

Even CNN let that cat out.

Just trying to help with that “complete” part of the AJC slogan.