No Evidence Aired in the Media? No Duty. No Apologies.
By Charlton Allen www.americanthinker.com
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not a sympathetic poster child by any reasonable standard. But the media’s sudden outrage over his deportation reveals more about its cynicism than any concern for due process.
Garcia, a Salvadoran national deported last month and now detained in El Salvador’s terrorism confinement center—CECOT—is being recast by CNN and its ideological allies as a victim of Trump-era cruelty. The media minders tell us he is a Maryland husband, a devoted father, and a community fixture.
Omitted from the headlines? Federal authorities have alleged links between Garcia and MS-13—the brutal cartel infamous for machete murders, child trafficking, prostitution, and transnational violence.
That’s not a minor footnote. Yet CNN, in its April 1 report, seems far more concerned that the Trump administration refused to provide evidence to the press than with the possibility that a violent gang member was living comfortably in suburban Maryland.
Their indignation boils down to this: the Trump administration didn’t send over a dossier of classified intelligence and investigation reports for CNN’s legal analyst to comb through on live TV—then dismiss as woefully insufficient, no matter how comprehensive it is.
And CNN is not alone in inserting this refrain into the teleprompter or the story. It’s become an incessant chorus across the legacy media whenever Trump-era immigration enforcement is discussed: No matter the threat, we demand the receipts.
Let’s be blunt: the Trump administration owes the press absolutely nothing when it comes to intelligence sharing or the factual underpinnings of enforcement actions—especially when ongoing investigations or extradition procedures are involved. I’ll say it again for the folks in the back of the room: not one thing.
This is a fundamental principle of law enforcement. No administration—Republican or Democrat—should be expected to lay out its hand for editorial boards before taking national security actions, particularly when that action involves a suspected member of a recognized terrorist group.
When it’s required, the presentation of evidence occurs before the appropriate channels in our immigration system—not in a press release or press conference. To do otherwise would be reckless, if not criminally negligent.
But the demand for “evidence” isn’t really about transparency. It’s a contemptuous political ritual—a means of discrediting any enforcement action taken against someone who checks the right ideological boxes. Illegal immigrant. Protected identity group. Claims a family connection. That’s the trifecta. The narrative writes itself: How could a man with a wife and a disabled child possibly be aligned with a terrorist group?
Apparently, the media would have us believe that gangbangers are celibate eremites—eunuchs who never marry, never father children, and certainly never exploit family ties as cover. The story writes itself, facts be damned. Sub out “gang affiliation” and sub in “alignment with Hamas,” and you have Mahmoud Khalil.
And by painting with such broad strokes, the media shamelessly attempts to impugn all immigration enforcement actions—turning every lawful removal into an act of unimaginable cruelty.
Now, contrast this with how the press treated Joe Biden. For years, concerns over Biden’s cognitive misfires—public lapses, verbal confusion, and blank stares—were dismissed as harmless quirks.
Instead, the ever-loyal legacy media parroted the insider narrative that President Biden was sharper than ever and ran circles around his staff. Where were CNN’s insistent demands for complete neurological workups? For unredacted health records? For a public accounting before he stepped into high-stakes diplomacy or nuclear command authority?
They didn’t come, and they weren’t going to. When the narrative favors the left, evidence is an afterthought.
The deeper issue here isn’t the individual case of Kilmar Garcia, though one hopes justice is done—and despite the hue and cry from the media outrage machine, it may already have been. The media believe that access equals authority.
In their view, no action is legitimate unless it’s first greenlit by the opinion desks at CNN, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. When the Biden administration bungled immigration entirely, it was framed as a “complex humanitarian challenge.” When Trump undertakes swift and certain action, it’s a national scandal—unless he declassifies sealed intelligence files for Anderson Cooper.
And make no mistake about it: had the evidence been shared discreetly—say, over an encrypted platform like Signal—the media would be triggered by that too.
The real objection here isn’t about secrecy or transparency. At its core, this outcry is about a restoration of national sovereignty, exercised by the wrong president.
If Garcia is even plausibly connected to the MS-13 world, then federal agents acted not with cruelty—but with vigilance.
This situation should not become a conversation about political optics or a Upton Sinclair–style muckraking tome about how the system grinds down a hardworking family man caught in some overly broad immigration dragnet. It was about preventing another American tragedy—one of the many committed by the thousands of dangerous gang members allowed into our nation willy-nilly by the prior administration.
To the media, that may not matter. But it matters greatly to voters and law enforcement officers tasked with protecting their communities. Simply put, this administration has no duty to spoon-feed “evidence” to hostile networks who will reject it anyway.
No evidence aired in the media? No duty. No apologies.
