First, let’s give you some useful facts that Fox 8 in New Orleans somewhat grudgingly admits in the story they aired on Friday night about media darling Paola Clouatre, the Mexican woman and Baton Rouge resident who was released last week from detention in Monroe by ICE…

Data posted to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website show ICE New Orleans agents made 2,848 arrests and detained 6,093 immigrants between January and March of this year.

That marks a 31% increase in arrests and a 24% increase in detentions over the same period last year. The data also reflect a 21% increase in detained immigrants with criminal convictions and a 9% increase in those with no criminal history.

What’s the headline of that piece? “ICE New Orleans detaining mostly immigrants with no criminal convictions.”

Oh, OK.

Then Fox 8 launches into a sob story about Clouatre, an illegal married to a Marine veteran who was detained in May by ICE. They picked her up at a green card hearing.

ICE New Orleans has jurisdiction over Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas, and operates nine detention centers, including the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana.

That’s the same detention center from which Paola Clouatre was recently released after a two-month stay.

“I was in shock. I can’t believe that was happening to me. Why am I here if me and my husband were trying to do the right thing?” Clouatre said.

Clouatre’s family says ICE arrested her after a green card application hearing at the New Orleans field office in May.

And why? Because she had a green card hearing that she skipped out on.

In 2018. Seven years ago. She’s apparently been in America for more than a decade, so she was here for more than three years before the hearing she skipped.

Clouatre says she was a homeless teenager at that point and had become estranged from her mother, and that’s why she missed the hearing. So it’s Mom’s fault. And Paola Clouatre doesn’t have any independent responsibility to get her immigration status taken care of before she starts a family in America.

It’s nice that she got her act together, married an American – a vet, at that – and has kids now. Really, it is. But here’s the question Fox 8 isn’t asking and never will…

Why is it in the United States of America’s national interest that teenage runaway illegal aliens get to come here and stay as long as they want?

Fox 8 never asked, or if they did they certainly didn’t report, how many of our tax dollars were spent educating or medicating Paola Clouatre. What has she cost us? We already know of at least two court hearings she’s cost us, plus a couple months’ worth of time at Richwood. More than likely that several thousand dollars is the tip of the iceberg.

What are the odds that a teenage runaway illegal alien committed crimes along the way to becoming a wife and mother unjustly detained by ICE? Not horrible, if we’re being honest.

We already know how utterly dishonest legacy corporate media is when it comes to immigration and deportation. Remember when they turned Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the MS-13 human trafficker and frequent domestic abuser, was branded the “Maryland Dad” by these same folks? And now we’re supposed to take their reporting on Paola Clouatre at face value?

This isn’t to say she’s a bad human being or to brand her a criminal. We don’t know anything about her. We certainly don’t know anything useful based on the hagiographic portrayal Andres Fuentes, the Fox 8 reporter responsible for this piece, painted about her.

We’re picking on Fox 8, but there are countless other legacy media outlets who have flogged this story about the Marine’s wife who was still nursing a baby when ICE took her away. And not one of these stories has bothered to pull at any of the obvious loose threads in this case, just like none of them bothered to pull at the obvious Kilmar Garcia threads, until somebody did and the whole thing became a major embarrassment.

She was released from the detention center in Monroe after Sen. John Kennedy’s office helped out with her case. That’s constituent service, which senators and congressmen do. Our Nathan Koenig lit up Steve Scalise last month for his staff doing the same for a New Orleans woman from Iran who’s lived here as an illegal alien for 47 years; Nathan isn’t wrong to be irritated at the inability to dispose of these cases for such a protracted period of time, but Scalise, Kennedy and the rest of the delegation act on all kinds of requests and these kinds of things are normal.

That said, ICE isn’t doing anything wrong in arresting, detaining and deporting illegal aliens. That is literally their job, and the majority of the American citizenry wants all of the illegals sent home.

Including Paola Clouatre. That might be unfortunate for her, and it certainly runs counter to the narrative Andres Fuentes and the folks at Fox 8 are pushing, but it’s the truth.

Because it isn’t like she came to America to be with her husband. She hadn’t met him when she came here. The husband was just a cool benefit to staying here.

Illegally.

And Adrian Clouatre, Marine veteran and all-around awesome guy that he so obviously is, assumedly knew his bride was an illegal when he married her.

Right?

If so, that’s what’s known as an assumption of risk.

If not, then…wow.

Fox 8 wants you to believe they’re all Paola Clouatres that ICE is arresting, and we have no idea whether that’s even a good thing. Nothing in Fuentes’ report covers how she came here, other than to say she and her mother were asylum-seekers from Mexico, which is relatively fishy in and of itself.

Did Paola Clouatre and her mother present themselves at a port of entry, like the border station in San Diego, and demand asylum? For what reason? Did she walk across the border somewhere else? Who helped her? Were they coyotes working for a cartel? Did she smuggle fentanyl in a backpack as part of her fee to be trafficked here? Why did she and her mother become estranged, which is another way to say Paola was a runaway? None of those are unreasonable questions, and if the answer to any of them is yes then we might conclude Paola Clouatre isn’t a complete innocent regardless of her lack of a criminal record.

Assuming that’s even true, because the Fox 8 piece in question only insinuates she doesn’t have a record. It doesn’t declare that to be a fact.

But the stats they give out, grudgingly, show that the increase in detentions is larger among criminals than among those with no criminal history.

Outside of illegally coming and staying in America, that is.

Those numbers don’t exactly prove out the assertion in the headline that ICE is busy busting up happy families like Paola Clouatre’s rather than getting rid of criminals and those people who have already been processed through the judicial system and ordered deported like Garcia was.

This kind of propagandistic “journalism” is why legacy corporate media is a zombie industry at best. Nobody believes this crap anymore.

If Paola Clouatre is the solid (non-)citizen Fox 8 makes her out to be, and an immigration judge consents to give her a green card, so be it. But she came here illegally, almost certainly as a fraudulent “asylum-seeker” from Mexico – why wouldn’t we get the juicy tale of persecution as to why she needed asylum here from Andres Fuentes? – and stiffed the judicial system at least once before sticking around for seven more years.

Two months of detention isn’t exactly unreasonable as a sanction for that. And we can root for Adrian and Paola Clouatre while still recognizing that illegal aliens don’t have the right to be here – and ICE is doing what we pay them to do when they detain people like her.