Ani O'Brien: The American immigration narrative & the assassination of truth

How routine law enforcement was rebranded as terror and why facts no longer survive partisan conflict

“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
— commonly attributed to Aeschylus

The claim that the “first casualty of war is truth” is often treated as metaphor. Currently, we are seeing it as a literal description of process. When political conflict is framed and experienced as existential, like when one side is portrayed as no longer merely wrong but morally illegitimate, truth stops functioning as a virtue and becomes an obstacle. Facts that complicate the preferred narrative are too harmful to the goal of winning the info war and so they are erased. History is repeatedly rewritten.

The current moral panic surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States is a near-perfect example of this dynamic. We are told that ICE operations today represent a new and uniquely cruel phase of American governance. CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, the BBC; they all say that families are being hunted, children weaponised, communities terrorised in ways unseen in modern history. Celebrities, Democrat politicians, and countless liberal women on TikTok tell us that what is happening now is unprecedented. This claim is observably, provably false. It is deliberately dishonest, and it relies on the destruction of historical memory. It is so incredibly easy to fact check the hyperbolic claims, but unfortunately those spreading them know all too well that ordinary people have not the time nor inclination to do their own research.

Immigration enforcement in the United States did not begin with Donald Trump. It did not begin with Republicans. It did not even begin with ICE, which was formally created in 2003 by consolidating existing enforcement authorities. Deportation has been a continuous function of the American state for decades and decades, expanded and defended by presidents of both parties, quite openly.

Under Bill Clinton, immigration enforcement was not an embarrassment but a political talking point. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 dramatically widened grounds for deportation, reduced judicial discretion, and accelerated removals. Clinton justified this explicitly in economic and social terms, warning that illegal immigration suppressed wages and strained public services. In his 1995 State of the Union address, he famously stated:

“We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.”

This was not controversial at the time. In fact, it was bipartisan orthodoxy and, between 1993 and 2001, removals roughly doubled. And that line of Clinton’s would be repeated ad nauseam by presidents who came after him, particularly Barack Obama.

Under George W Bush, deportations continued to rise. Bush paired enforcement rhetoric with proposals for guest worker programmes but never questioned the legitimacy of removals themselves. Guest worker programmes are government schemes that allow foreign nationals to enter a country legally for a limited period to fill specific labour shortages, usually in industries that rely on low wage, seasonal, or hard-to-staff work. Participants are typically required to leave once their visa expires.

Guest worker programmes have long been used as the rhetorical ‘escape hatch’ in immigration debates invoking proof of compassion and as a way to square economic demand for labour with political pressure for control.

By the end of George W Bush’s presidency, annual deportations exceeded 300,000, a level of enforcement that would today provoke wall-to-wall media outrage. At the time, however, these figures were not treated as evidence of cruelty or authoritarianism. They were reported largely as outputs of a functioning state carrying out routine law enforcement. There were policy disagreements, sure, but deportation itself was not framed as a moral scandal.

In fact, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama explicitly criticised George W Bush for failing to enforce immigration law robustly enough, arguing that lax enforcement had fuelled illegal immigration. As Obama put it:

“We have a broken immigration system… and we haven’t done enough to secure our borders or enforce the laws on the books…”

He is on the record repeatedly and emphatically framing Bush-era enforcement not as excessive, but as insufficient.

Therefore unsurprisingly, the real transformation both in scale and in subsequent historical erasure came under Barack Obama. Between 2009 and 2016, more than three million people were deported from the United States, more than under any previous president and any president since. The Obama administration explicitly prioritised the removal of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions as Trump’s second administration is doing now.

Sources: DHS Yearbooks of Immigration Statistics; Migration Policy Institute; ICE annual reports

Not only was this policy and direction not condemned, it was presented as proof of Obama’s success as President. His nickname “Deporter in Chief” was used not by Republicans but by Democrats wanting to show his strength on illegal immigration. And yet, within a few years, this entire enforcement record vanished from mainstream political memory. The policies and targets did not change, but at some point, acknowledging this history simply stopped being useful.

No figure illustrates this historical laundering more clearly than Tom Homan. In 2013, Obama appointed Homan as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, the senior official overseeing deportations nationwide. Then in 2015, Obama awarded him a Presidential Rank Award as a Distinguished Executive, one of the highest honours available to a career civil servant. At the time, Homan was praised for leadership, professionalism, and effectiveness. Today, the same man is portrayed by Democrats and much of the media as a uniquely monstrous figure; an avatar of sadism whose very existence is treated as proof of moral collapse. The actions for which he was decorated are now cited as evidence of barbarism.


Perhaps America’s most ruthless and clinical political operative, Hillary Clinton is right in the thick of this collapse of truth. Like her husband, Clinton’s historical position on illegal immigration has not been ambiguous. As a senator, Secretary of State, and a presidential candidate, she supported deportation as a matter of law enforcement and national sovereignty. In 2008, she stated plainly:

“If you’re here illegally, you should be deported.”

In 2014, defending the Obama administration’s record, she said:

“The administration has deported more people than ever before. The message is clear: if you come here illegally, you will be sent back.”

At no point during these years did Clinton describe deportation as terror or enforcement as illegitimate. She described it as governance.

And yet, now, in January 2026, Clinton joined a coordinated campaign accusing ICE of “terrorising a population” and “using children as pawns” following an arrest in Minneapolis, despite the factual record directly contradicting that claim.

Hillary Clinton has not had a moral awakening. That is not why she holds a vastly different view on illegal immigration now. Nope. She has had a recalibration of incentives. It is now politically expedient to be anti-border enforcement because it allows one to be anti-Trump.

The above-mentioned Minneapolis incident deserves close examination because it is a textbook example of how truth is actively destroyed at pace.

An event occurs »> A factual sequence exists »> And yet within hours, that sequence is overwritten by a more politically useful fiction »> repeated with confidence by elected officials »> and laundered through a compliant media ecosystem.

According to repeated and consistent statements from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE conducted a targeted operation to arrest an illegal immigrant who had been released into the United States under the Biden administration. As agents approached, their target fled on foot, abandoning his five year old child. ICE officers did not pursue the child, but they did remain with him to ensure his safety while other officers apprehended his father. Officers then made repeated attempts to have the child’s mother take custody, explicitly assuring her that she would not be arrested, but she refused. It was at the father’s request that the child remained with him as he was detained.

This has been stated and reiterated multiple times by both DHS and ICE. There have been no shifting narratives, retractions, or deflection. Nor has there been any contradictory evidence produced. No body-cam footage has emerged showing a child being “used as bait.”

It has emerged that the mother of the child, who is pregnant, was in their home not far from the scene. She had a teenaged child with her. Agents made contact with her telling her that they wanted to hand over her child and she was not at risk of being detained. CNN has reported that it was neighbours who told her not to open the door and this mass mobilisation of busy-bodies has become a significant factor in the escalation of what should be straightforward law enforcement operations.

Homeland Security has said that once ICE agents realised the mother would not open the door, they took the little boy to a nearby McDonalds and played his favourite music in the car. The boy has now travelled with his father to an ICE facility but only because that is what his parents decided.

Click to view

And yet almost immediately, Democratic politicians and sympathetic media figures asserted without qualification that ICE had “arrested a child,” “used him as bait,” and “terrorised a family.” The language was confident and declarative. Democrat Representative Joaquin Castro publicly suggested the child was actually missing and announced inspections of detention facilities, amplifying the impression that ICE had effectively kidnapped a five year old.

ICE’s response was unusually blunt, but entirely understandable. The agency described the claim as “an abject lie” and stated unequivocally that the child had been abandoned by his father. Homeland Security reiterated that officers’ primary concern throughout the operation was the child’s safety not to detain him; they were looking after him. ICE went further, asking whether Hillary Clinton’s heart also ached for the thousands of families who have lost loved ones to violent criminal illegal immigrants.

That a false narrative spread is not particularly newsworthy, but the speed and ease with which it did is something to behold. As the saying goes:

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

When you’re spinning a yarn there is no evidentiary threshold to clear or requirement to wait for verification. And, of course, a story that frames federal enforcement as monstrous is inherently more valuable than a boring truth involving procedure, custody refusals, and an adult fleeing responsibility. The narrative was set immediately by the Democrats and facts ceased to matter. Now as the federal government seeks to correct and clarify, their statements are the ones treated as propaganda.

The little boy at the centre of the propaganda wars.

Minneapolis is being used to frame the narrative of uniquely cruel operations and terror. However, what changed to produce the escalation in Minneapolis was not federal policy. ICE operations are occurring across the United States right now without incident. The difference is state and local obstruction. In most states, criminal illegal immigrants are transferred to ICE custody upon release from jail or prison, as has occurred under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. But, this time, Minnesota chose to deviate from these long held norms. Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have not been shy about opposing ICE, bragging about their non-cooperation and framing routine enforcement as moral atrocity. When states refuse to hand over criminals at the point of release from prison, ICE must then conduct arrests in the community. These arrests are more visible, more confrontational, and easier to weaponise rhetorically. The responsibility for escalation should not be laid at the feet of local and federal enforcement. Rather it should be proportioned to the state elected officials who whipped their communities into a frenzy and deliberately impeded lawful operations.

This pattern of behaviour is not uniquely American, though Americans arguably practise it with a particular theatrical intensity. In New Zealand, for example, the Leader of the Opposition, Chris Hipkins, has launched election year by constructing an alternative economic reality; one in which inflation, fiscal deterioration, and cost of living pressures are treated as the sole fault of the government elected just two years ago rather than the predictable consequences of decisions taken by the government he led preceding that. His supporters will either buy this revisionism wholesale or they will be content to go along with the narrative because once the political contest is framed as a struggle between good and evil rather than competence and consequence, accuracy becomes optional.

The examples discussed here focus largely on the left attacking the right or centre-right because in both the United States and New Zealand, those factions currently hold power, and so they are the natural targets of opposition narratives. But I am not making the claim that the death of truth is a uniquely left wing responsibility. No faction is immune. All political actors lie when the incentives reward it, and all media ecosystems amplify narratives that flatter their allies and punish their enemies.

Lying is relatively low cost in modern politics. The news cycle moves too quickly for sustained accountability, corrections rarely travel as far or as quickly as falsehoods, and reputational consequences of lying are minimal. A misleading claim can dominate headlines for days while retractions and debunking, if they occur at all, are buried and quickly forgotten. Politicians understand this and so do journalists. The system rewards speed, outrage, and moral certainty, not accuracy, context, or historical memory.

The victims of this dynamic are not the politicians who deploy misinformation, nor the media organisations that profit from it. The victims are the public who are deprived of facts, manipulated by outrage, and left navigating a political landscape in which truth is not merely contested but actively undermined. This is why the metaphor of truth as a casualty is slightly misleading. Truth does not die accidentally or of natural causes. It is assassinated, early, efficiently, and without remorse.

Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.