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Breitbart uses photo of gang members in El Salvador to smear DACA recipients

Completely misleading.

CREDIT: TWITTER
CREDIT: TWITTER

On Tuesday night, Breitbart News presented a photo of MS-13 gang members in El Salvador as if they were DACA recipients in the United States.

The photo of El Salvadoran gangsters appeared at the top of an article about DACA recipients on Breitbart’s website and on its Twitter account. Twitter user @_Almaqah traced the image back to a Getty photo from January 2013 showing gang members gesturing in San Salvador.

The tweet was deleted and the photo accompanying the story was later replaced with a photo of a man in handcuffs.

Breitbart’s accompanying piece discusses how 2,139 DACA recipients have had their protected status revoked because of alleged criminal activities over five years. But there are currently about 800,000 people enrolled in DACA, so the percentage of DACA recipients involved in criminal behavior ends up being roughly 0.3 percent, which is extremely low in comparison to the national rate of people with felony convictions (over 8.5 percent) or people who are arrested by age 23 (roughly 30 percent).

Last month, former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon left his job as the White House’s chief strategist and resumed running Breitbart, which he had been doing before going to work for Trump. He was joined by Seb Gorka, another recently departed White House official, who has been dogged by alleged connections to Nazi groups. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the co-chair of Trump’s voter fraud commission, is also a paid columnist.

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Shortly after Bannon’s departure, President Trump endorsed the website Bannon once called “the platform for the alt-right.”

During Bannon’s first week back, Breitbart published a defense of a white supremacist organization.