The Trump administration has thoroughly failed the conservative information ecosystem credited with elevating Donald Trump back into the White House. Right-wing media wanted pictures of dangerous criminals being arrested for mass deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, they’ve gotten images of toddlers detained, a 37-year-old mother shot dead, an elderly grandfather dragged from his home and minor U.S. citizens injured and in trauma units. A now-infamous story of Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old in Minneapolis taken by ICE on Tuesday, is the perfect illustration of how fractured the media landscape has become in the age of Trump — and how the right’s hermetically sealed system is now undermining the administration’s deportation policies.
To many Americans, the viral image of a child swept up in an enforcement dragnet is horrifying. Yet in the right-wing media silo, the reaction — if there has been any at all — is not concern but suspicion. Conservative outlets have insisted the story is a lie and are clearly exasperated by the widespread coverage of the child’s after-school arrest and transfer to a detention center over 1,300 miles away in Texas.
