Border czar denies ICE arrests kids at bus stops; agency confirms sending Afghans to Africa instead.

As it ran on the front

Here's how you know which claim to believe: one of them is a denial, and one of them is a shipment manifest. Connecticut's senator says ICE agents made arrests at school bus stops. The border czar says that didn't happen. Fine — people say things, people deny things, that's the news business on a slow day. Except the same agency, on the same wire, confirmed it is sending Afghans and others to Africa as part of an expanding "third country" deportation program. You don't need the bus stop story to be true to know what this agency does. You just need to read the paragraph next to it.

This is the trick, and it's an old one: deny the specific, small, checkable thing — a school bus stop, a location, a time — because a denial like that is cheap and hard to disprove without video. Meanwhile the big thing, the thing that doesn't need denying because nobody's bothered to ask about it in a press conference yet, just keeps happening. Afghans who worked with American forces, who qualified for protection under programs this country wrote for exactly that purpose, get put on a plane to a country they've never set foot in, and that's not the leaked part, that's the confirmed part. Nobody had to deny it because nobody in power was made to answer for it.…