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.
Breitbart is using a Getty photo of MS-13 members in El Salvaor to talk about DACA recipients in the U.S. because it is a racist hate site pic.twitter.com/hGr5s4NyRX
— Almaqah (@_Almaqah) September 5, 2017
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).
In an effort to justify their bigotry, Breitbart points to 1/4 of 1% of #Dreamers who *might* have broken a law (note they added "accused"). pic.twitter.com/ulDgUGNyzG
— Avi B (@JasperAvi) September 6, 2017
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.
Shortly after Bannon’s departure, President Trump endorsed the website Bannon once called “the platform for the alt-right.”
Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at @BreitbartNews…maybe even better than ever before. Fake News needs the competition!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017
During Bannon’s first week back, Breitbart published a defense of a white supremacist organization.