A November 23 New York Times story, “Two Men, One Identity, they both Paid the Price,” has once again brought journalistic fairness’ demise into the spotlight. In the 35-years that I have written about and studied immigration, at no time was there a period when enforcement proponents got a fair shake in legacy media reporting. Bias has always been and is still now across the board, mostly detectable in the acute imbalance between the number of sources quoted, mostly multiple expansionists versus few if any restrictionists. The implication is always that more immigration is an unqualified positive; enforcement is nativistic.
Summarizing the Times story, the two subjects who “paid the price” are middle-class Minnesotan Dan Kluver with no criminal history and three-times deported Guatemalan national Romeo Perez-Bravo who has a long history of identity theft, a wrongful death suit against him as Kluber, three D.U.I.s and five anchor baby citizen children. Beginning with the NYT’s pandering title which suggests that both men are victims, the story is written to generate sympathy for the illegal alien felon. One man is an American citizen who has done nothing criminal in his four-decade long life. The other is an illegal alien who, in addition to his repeated re-entry, a felony, embarked on years of identity theft, another felony. The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act makes it a federal crime to knowingly transfer, possess, or use another person’s identification without lawful authority. American adults lost $47 billion to identity fraud and scams in 2024, an increase of $4 billion over 2023, according to a new report.
The real Kluver spent more than a decade living with the consequences of Perez-Bravo’s criminality — annual tax audits, budgets that never added up, and marital stress. whispered arguments after the kids went to bed. Kluver kept calling government numbers and waited on hold, went to the I.R.S., visited Social Security offices around the state and filed police reports three times. Finally, he agreed to send the I.R.S. $150 each month, which he’s done more than 35 times.
The story’s editors allowed the reporters to write a biased story; fairness and balance, once a basic journalism requirement, is missing. On a lengthy story like this one, often three or more editors scrutinize the text. Despite its glaring liberal slant, each editor gave the story the Times approval seal.
Eli Saslow, reporter, and photojournalist Gabriela Bhaskar have backgrounds which indicate that they should know how to correctly put a story together. Saslow won Pulitzer Prizes in 2013 and again in 2023. Like Saslow, Bhaskar asserts her commitment to upholding the standards of integrity outlined in the Times Ethical Journalism Handbook. The handbook provides a noble set of guidelines that, in this case, neither the reporters nor the editors completely fulfilled.
The Kluver/Perez-Bravo saga would have benefited from addressing the great enabler in this tale—the illegal aliens’ employers who hired him without processing his stolen Social Security number through E-Verify. The Kansas cement plant, the Tennessee paper mill, the Ohio construction company, the Nebraska cereal plant and the Missouri dog food plant producer that hired illegal aliens who listed a stolen Social Security number on their I-9 forms violated 8 U.S. Code 1324a, Unlawful Employment of Aliens, punishable by fines and/prison sentences.
The best way to avoid the painful, years long turmoil that Kluver unfairly suffered through, and the criminal U.S. life Perez-Bravo led since his illegal arrival, is rigorous unbending immigration law enforcement. To echo the late U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan words (D-Texas) “those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out, and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”
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