What was already a pretty fucking sick and horrifying story from WVTM about seven Alabamans getting arrested and charged with running a sex trafficking ring out of a bunker in some third-world rural county gets an added dose of MAGA absurdity from the (emphasis added) sentence quoted in the headline. “The Department of Homeland Security is investigating potential gang connections and the immigration status of the suspects,” WVTM writes in the article about the arrests of William (Chase) McElroy, Dalton Terrell, Andres Trejo, Timothy St John, Rebecca Brewer, Ricky Terrell, and Sara Terrell, for pimping out children between the ages of 3 and 15 for at least the last two years.
How’s that angle of the investigation going? Trejo was arrested back in April, which is probably enough time to figure out where he was born and then send him to CECOT or South Sudan for the rest of his life instead of standing trial in the American justice system. What about McElroy, St John, Brewer, and the Terrells? Are they secretly Canadians or Australians who were toddlers when their parents overstayed their tourist visas while they were vacationing in rural Alabama in 1993?
Homeland Security has jurisdiction over sex trafficking investigations because of the tragically common overlap with the larger world of transnational human trafficking. It’s just easier to exploit minors from third world countries than those born in the first world parts of the United States. But those two words, “immigration status” – for which WVTM provides no attribution or sourcing because they’re a rural Alabama NBC affiliate owned and likely neglected by Hearst Media – speak volumes about the MAGA cult reality-warping infecting the story of a heinous and evidently thus far solely US-based sex-trafficking ring. It’s as if someone at DHS knew the base needs a teeny tiny hook to paint this as part of their larger war against all enemies foreign and domestic that could theoretically, if you use your imagination and squint really hard, be kind of foreign too. In a way.
Look, they were hanging out with a rough-looking Latino pedophile (who probably is American but let’s keep that vague). That makes them just a little less white and Alabaman, sort of.
Whatever helps them process the fact that unspeakable sex crimes against minors aren’t just for rich Jews, British royals out of the line of succession, and Hillary Clinton. That Methstein Island is no better than the original, which actually when you think of it has indoor plumbing and nice beaches. And fewer Klan members as neighbors. Hell it might kind of hurt to realize that one’s fellow MAGAmericans were doing pretty much the same thing, just by and for the poor and filthy, so casually alluding to an immigration angle without any further detail whatsoever is actually the responsible thing to do to protect the pride of those who regard themselves as the hard-working, God-fearing, flag-waving, honest, and morally decent folks out there in real America.