Media Matters, the nonprofit, Web-based, progressive research and
information center “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing
and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” discovered that Slate.com used a dubious source for an article that asked, “Are a small number of immigrant wives faking domestic abuse to stay in the country?”
And he has a connection to Orange County's own crazed Zsa Zsa impersonating birther, Orly Taitz.
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Francis McInnis' Slate article, published Nov. 8, alleged that immigrant women are pretending to be abused by their spouses in order to exploit a provision of the Violence Against Women Act that in certain cases allows abused non-citizens married to citizens or permanent residents to avoid deportation and/or petition for a green card rather than relying on their spouse to do so on their behalf.
Media Matters calls into question the evidence behind the claim, or lack thereof as presented in the piece. Few sources are named except for former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigator John Sampson, who now runs a Denver-based company called CSI Consulting and Investigations.
CSI's mission? To assist victims “of American immigration fraud, immigration marriage fraud, Immigration VAWA fraud, Immigration U Visa Fraud, Immigration T Visa Fraud, Green Card sham marriages, Immigration domestic violence allegation fraud,
and I-360 Self Petitions based upon false allegations of domestic
violence or abuse.”
The Slate piece does not mention Sampson's company or the fact that he's earning coin from the husbands presented as victims. But the former ICE officer is given free reign to state that immigration authorities “make no effort to validate documents submitted by a wife claiming abuse, do not interview her, and discount evidence from the American husband that contradicts the abuse claim.”
So, what does this have to do with Taitz? As Media Matters points out, Sampson has signed affidavits the Laguna Niguel lawyer/dentist/real estate saleswoman has used in her endless birther lawsuits that seek to prove Barack Obama is not eligible to be president. That's also missing from the Slate piece.
Media Matters only briefly mentions Orly's bogus legal moves, spending more virtual ink peeling away at McInnis' “bogus trend story.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.