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As the Trump administration continues to enact the will of the voters by tightening the borders that the Biden administration opened wide to import millions of illegals to vote Democrat, panicked Left-wing media propagandists desperately try to prop up their narrative that the President is a cruel, xenophobic dictator.

Case in point: the Chicago Tribune posted today a maudlin, 1300-word profile of an immigrant worried about her legal status, called “‘I’m really not safe’: A Venezuelan poet’s fight to stay and write in the US.”

Oriette D’Angelo, 34, “came to Chicago on a student visa over a decade ago, seeking professional opportunities and escape from a crumbling infrastructure and violence in her home country.” A student who researches and writes poems about themes of dictatorship, she is in the fifth year of a doctorate program at the University of Iowa, which she expects to complete next year. Her goal is to teach at a university. But she has “put years into her degree in Spanish and Portuguese, only to have it threatened by Trump’s immigration agenda.”

By Trump’s “agenda,” the Tribune means enforcing immigration law. Democrats condemn that as racist and dictatorial because it frustrates their survival strategy of importing hordes of potential voters.

In 2020, D’Angelo applied for temporary protected status (TPS) when her Venezuelan passport expired. This resulted in the loss of her international student status. This January, Trump revoked that temporary protected status, so D’Angelo set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay for an international student status application. That application was approved by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in mid-April.

Yes, nothing says racist, oppressive, uncompassionate, dictatorial cruelty quite like having your immigration application, paid for by others, approved for the second time. And yet D’Angelo claims, “Survival mode is not over. Even though I have my student status back, I’m really not safe.”

Why not? “Venezuelans are being categorized as bad,” she claims falsely. The Trump administration is not painting all Venezuelans as bad – just the members of the brutal, Venezuelan-based, international Tren de Aragua gang, which the Biden administration allowed to infiltrate and establish footholds in several American cities. If D’Angelo isn’t a member of Tren de Aragua, there should be no problem.

Nevertheless, she frets, “I want to stay here professionally. I want to finish my dissertation.” With all due respect, someone who came to the United States over ten years ago to study poems about themes of dictatorship, who spent years getting a degree in a language she already speaks, who wants an academic career but still hasn’t finished her dissertation, is not a serious intellectual but a “perpetual student” simply sponging off American largesse. Meanwhile, what does she have to offer her adopted country in return? It’s not unreasonable to ask what potential immigrants to America bring to the table.

And yet the Tribune wants us to be concerned that D’Angelo is “in an uncomfortable state of limbo, grasping for loopholes that might let her continue her academic research and writing… Everything she had worked for — her professional future and career aspirations” is in “jeopardy.”

The Tribune paints a dark, ominous picture of D’Angelo as being threatened by a Trump dictatorship-in-the-making:

She is cautious about what she shares on the social media platform X, as the Trump administration has said that it doesn’t want to let in international students who are critical of the country. After spending years studying the patterns of dictatorships, she said that she can sense when politics becomes personal.

This is, frankly, bullshit. The Trump administration has not said it doesn’t want students who are “critical” of the country. Officials have, however, declared that we have no interest in welcoming foreign students who openly express hatred for America and a desire to subvert and destroy it. This seems like a commonsense demand; how is it dictatorial to reject immigrants and foreign students who are self-declared threats?

The Tribune also notes that D’Angelo’s arm is covered with tattoos, which is problematic because the Trump administration “has used tattoos in combination with other justifications on a checklist to deport migrants.”

This is disingenuous at best. U.S. immigration officials are not deporting people because they have tattoos. They have, however, used tattoos to identify whether some migrants are members of foreign gangs like the savage Salvadoran MS-13, and therefore violent threats to American citizens. Since D’Angelo’s tattoos are of “a hummingbird, her mother’s handwriting, and designs like air and flowers,” she’s hardly in danger of being swept up in an ICE raid.

Her poetry, in case you were wondering, uses “rich metaphors to explore big themes” like “gender-based harm,” and reflects a belief that human beings are inherently political. They will do whatever it takes to survive, including crossing mountains and borders in pursuit of a better life. D’Angelo said most Venezuelans come to Chicago seeking the physical safety or economic security that they didn’t have in their native country, which has been downgraded from the most prosperous country in South America to a socialist hellhole, thanks to actual dictators like the late Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

“It seems so unfair that the people who ran away from that … are now forced to go back, when they came here looking for safety,” D’Angelo says. As tragic as their circumstances might be, however, America is under no obligation to take in everyone in the world who wants a better life. It’s not even possible. We have to draw the line somewhere, and that’s the purpose of immigration law.

In this time of what the Tribune fear-mongers as “intense fear,” D’Angelo and her girlfriend got married in March – not for immigration purposes, she claims, but out of concern about federal attacks on LGBTQ rights.

“With the current administration, we don’t know if same-sex marriage will still be legal in the next few years,” she said. There is absolutely no basis for this anxiety, since Trump has never threatened same-sex marriage and only the Supreme Court can overturn that right anyway.

This entire emotionally manipulative Chicago Tribune piece about a woman who is in zero danger of being deported is designed to stir compassion for all the supposedly innocent victims of Donald Trump’s purportedly racist immigration cruelty. The media don’t want you to know the truth, which is that the Trump administration is simply enforcing immigration law (something the Biden administration actively ignored) to protect American citizens and sovereignty (something that doesn’t even appear on the Democrat party’s list of priorities).

The American people voted for this. We aren’t racist or anti-immigrant. We just want to be a nation of laws with a secure border – a commonsense expectation that sends the Democrat Party into a frenzy of outrage because it frustrates their goal of one-party hegemony.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior