Washington Post Publishes Positive Story About Illegal Immigrant, Downplays Criminal Past
Galtsog Gantulga is an illegal immigrant who may be about to be deported to Mongolia from the state of Virginia. According to The Washington Post, the 22-year-old man “is a gifted (dance) instructor who senses when his students need to talk or want to dance but are too shy to take the initiative.”
In fact, he’s so great that we’re breathlessly told how his plight is so awful that he’s caused a lifelong Republican to vote Democrat in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race and that “a disparate crew of lawyers, military veterans, a dog walker, an entomologist and others united in their love for dancing have been on a crusade to protect the instructor.”
What they don’t tell you until the third paragraph is that Gantulga has a criminal history. See, the dance instructor was “arrested twice in 2016 for drunken driving.”
Well, okay. That’s bad, but surely — as the folks at the WaPo points out — he deserves another chance, right?
After all, “(h)e hurt no one in the two drunken driving incidents … and has served time behind bars. He also sold his car and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.”
It’s not until well into the story that we learn the details of his crimes.
“Living alone for the first time, Gantulga landed a job at the Arthur Murray Dance Center in Alexandria and worked his way up to a top instructor,” the story reads. “But he was also drinking, sometimes too much.”
“In July 2016, police arrested him for drunken driving. Four months later, he was arrested again, for driving under the influence and a hit-and-run that involved him striking a parked car and leaving the scene. (Emphasis ours.) He was convicted both times and served about a month in jail.”
Those are some pretty serious charges, to say nothing of the fact that Gantulga was protected under DACA, something that would obviously be terminated if you committed a crime.
“Mr. Gantulga entered the United States on a nonimmigrant visa but currently does not have lawful status in the United States,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said. “Gantulga has proven himself to be a public safety threat.”
However, most of the WaPo story isn’t about Gantulga’s criminal history. Instead, they focus on the fact that deportation is just so unfair to such a gifted dance instructor (who happens to have two DUIs, one of which was a hit-and-run, but is that really so important?).
“With the federal government pushing to expel Gantulga, the dance students and studio managers mobilized to keep him in the United States, getting a firsthand look at the nation’s immigration system in the process,” the story reads. “They were stunned that Gantulga appeared at his immigration court hearings via video link from the detention center where he was being held, 150 miles away.”
“They were shocked that immigrants facing deportation proceedings did not have a right to a court-appointed lawyer, that an immigration judge could refuse to set bond and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could keep Gantulga locked up for months even after bond was set and Heimach rushed over with a check.”
With all this shocking and stunning going on, nobody was shocked or stunned that Gantulga committed two crimes separate from entering the United States on a non-immigrant visa and staying? And these weren’t property crimes, either — while The Washington Post makes sure to note that he hurt no one, the reason that DUI is a crime is because it could potentially hurt someone. There’s nothing to say Gantulga won’t do it again, no matter if he sold his car or if he attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
“I’m a Republican, but the current administration is creating a national humanitarian tragedy,” Charlie Heimach, Gantulga’s aforementioned Republican supporter, told The Post. “This is ridiculous.”
That’s actually the law, Mr. Heimach. The law is not a humanitarian tragedy. Gantulga entered on a non-immigrant visa — albeit as a 9-year-old — received a reprieve from DACA, but then committed not just one crime but two. If anything, the United States of America has shown tremendous patience with Gantulga over the years. That patience has been abused in a manner which endangers public safety, which is why he’s in the process of being deported.
Yet, this fact is almost totally downplayed in a story which serves as a sob piece decrying any sort of governmental intervention in illegal immigration. It makes one wonder just what kind of crime an illegal immigrant has to commit in order to get deported.
Is it a DUI crash? Like the one Constantino Banda-Acosta — a man who had been deported 15 times — caused in May of 2017, leaving a mother and her child in the hospital with traumatic brain injuries? Or does death have to occur, like in the crash caused by Elizabeth Vargas-Hernandez in February of 2017 that killed a missionary?
Is that what has to happen before a crime becomes deportable? Because at that point, it’s already too late.
H/T The Daily Caller
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