I cannot truthfully say that I have noticed everything that the newspaper I sometimes call The Philadelphia Enquirer^[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. has published on immigration, but I can truthfully state that if our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, the newspaper of record for the six million plus metropolitan area, and the first newspaper I check in the morning, has ever published anything trying to help illegal immigrants get legal, I have missed it.

Instead, the newspaper has spent the last few years doing everything it could to paint Donald Trump as an irredeemable fascist and wannabe authoritarian dictator. Columnists like Helen Ubiñas and Will Bunch have hammered continually on Mr Trump, Mr Bunch especially consumed by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, and we noted how he, a journolist^[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading who claims to support freedom of speech and of the press — hint: he really doesn’t — launched a tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and then-future President Trump, and conflated the President trying to keep his promise to the voters to the Nazis sending Jews to the gas chambers. The Inquirer itself reported that three percent of the residents in the city are illegal immigrants!

The newspaper’s reporting and strident voice didn’t help the Democrats all that much. While Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff carried Philadelphia 568,571 (78.57%) to 144,311 (19.94%), the Democrat’s margin was lower than what Joe Biden racked up four years previously, and Mr Trump carried the Commonwealth.

Instead, the Inquirer to use the correct spelling, keeps publishing sob stories about the poor, poor, pitiful illegals:

ICE rumors have the Italian Market under stress. Undocumented workers fear losing the lives they’ve built in America

An immigration crackdown is stilling the vibrancy at the Ninth Street mainstay, with undocumented workers and customers taking cover.

by Jeff Gammage and Michelle Myers | Saturday, January 8, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Victoria knew something was wrong as she rode the 64 SEPTA bus to the Italian Market, intending to do some shopping on a day off from her cleaning job.

On most days the seats are full of familiar Latino faces. But on her recent trip there were only three other passengers, and none, said Victoria, who came here from Mexico, looked like her.

She arrived at a mostly empty market, with some of the produce stalls unexpectedly closed and others staffed by only a worker or two.

“Our people are gone, forced into hiding,” said a tearful Victoria, who declined to provide her last name because she, like some absent market workers and customers, is undocumented. “To see a place that’s usually full of life like this, it’s truly disheartening.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but it’s just more documentation of the same sob story.

There’s an amusing aspect to the newspaper’s horror. Mr Bunch, in a Sunday afternoon, spittle-flecked column, told readers that the deportations so far were all for show, a “mostly a made-for-TV and puffed-up reality show,” that “so far, a regime that promised voters millions of deportations has arrested no more than 1,100 migrants in any given day and last weekend booked just 300, according to NBC News.”

Still, the fact that the launch of Trump’s “mass deportation” is largely performative — statistically, for now anyway, the numbers of undocumented migrant arrests and deportations are no higher than peak days under Joe Biden — doesn’t make the performance any less alarming, let alone downright unAmerican. It’s dangerous when our government is staging photo-ops and even gaming the internet (stay tuned) to create a fake reality, and it’s appalling when their reality show has already tortured hundreds of mistreated deportees, while causing a nonstop panic attack for millions of immigrants in our communities, and riling up his MAGA base with mostly fake news to make them believe the U.S. is under an invasion.

President Trump has been in office for only three weeks, yet the columnist tells us that deportations are no higher than the top deportations under President Biden, as though that’s significant. As for “causing a nonstop panic attack” among illegals, that’s a good thing. We’ve already heard of illegals ‘self-deporting’ back to their home countries, and every one who does that is another illegal immigrant gone from our country; that’s a good thing. And with news of such spreading abroad, it reduces the number of people trying to enter illegally, due to the very reasonable fear that they’ll just be rounded up and deported.

The first cited story tells us an important thing: the Italian Market district with some businesses closed and others operating on a skeleton staff means that a very significant number of the people who worked there are in the country illegally.

It’s simple: President Trump ran on stopping illegal immigration and deporting those already here illegally, and the American voters chose to elect him. Despite all of the messages from the credentialed media that Mr Trump is a horrible person who would establish a fascist dictatorship, the American people chose to elect him. Everyone knew what his policy proposals were, and the voters still chose him. The Inquirer kept claiming that Mr Trump was a threat to democracy, and here we have that same newspaper protesting the policies chosen in a free, fair, and democratic election.