| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannOn Aug. 29, The Washington Post published a bombshell report alleging that the Trump administration had orchestrated a campaign to systematically deny passports to Latinos born along the border. “The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Latinos along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown,” the paper wrote. But, as HuffPost's Roque Planas reported Monday, the Post withheld key data, mischaracterized information and lobbed an allegation of fraud at a deceased doctor without speaking to his family members, who complained publicly. We asked Roque about his story. How did this story come about? The Post's report was huge news, and immediately editors at HuffPost wanted to follow up on the story. The assignment fell to me. When did you start to believe the Post had gotten something wrong? What was your reaction? I was skeptical upon first reading and told my editor so. It’s not that I thought the report was wrong per se, the piece was just thinly reported. The Post didn’t have data to back up a huge accusation against the Trump administration -- the paper relied upon anecdote alone. But it was also clear that those who crafted the piece had limited understanding of the history of the problem. The first version claimed that the State Department had denied passports in large numbers to Hispanics delivered along the border by midwives suspected of fraud since the Obama administration. In fact, the widespread passport denials in those cases date to the George W. Bush years. The paper corrected the error within hours after Slate's Mark Joseph Stern criticized the mistake on Twitter. But the Post didn’t append a correction notice until a couple of days later, after Stern published a full piece skewering the Post for botching a basic fact and trying to hide it by correcting without notice. That was another red flag. A couple of days after the Post published its report, the State Department put out a rebuttal that included data on passport denials in suspect midwife cases. But it only included percentages, which are meaningless. Because let’s say hypothetically that the State Department challenges 500 passport applications one year and denies 100, but then challenges 2,500 the next year and denies 450, now State can say “look, the denial rate went down from 20 percent to 18 percent” -- even though more people got denied and the problem got worse. So I requested the raw numbers and they gave them to me. And the raw numbers clearly showed a steady drop in the number of passport denials in suspect midwife cases from a peak in 2015 to the current year. To this day, those numbers aren't included in the Post’s report, and I couldn’t find them reported anywhere else, either. I had started to suspect the story might have bigger problems. As I called other sources with knowledge of these cases, it turned out that, yeah, it really did. What was the hardest part about reporting this out? I don’t take any pleasure in tearing down the work of my colleagues at other media outlets. That element of the reporting was uncomfortable, particularly when it came time to send off the queries to the Post. There’s also an ethical concern that in contradicting the Post’s reporting, some people will take away the mistaken message that this very serious problem doesn’t deserve attention. Regardless of whether the Post’s main assertion of a Trump-era crackdown on Hispanic citizenship claims at the border stands based in its reporting, hundreds of people with legitimate citizenship claims do face heavy scrutiny every year and some wind up stuck in Mexico or put into deportation proceedings. There were a number of errors in the Post story. What's the most serious one and why? To my mind, the most serious error is the framing -- all the other problems stem from that. There’s a broad trend in immigration reporting and political debate to cast blame on Trump for harsh or unfair aspects of the system that in some cases predate him. That appears to be what tripped the Post up here. The contradictory numbers aren't as big of a problem as the fact that the anecdotal evidence cited in the piece doesn’t reveal trends unique to Trump. The Post reports that it found cases of people being denied passports because they were delivered by suspect midwives -- this was the thrust of the first version of the piece, which has been written through three times now. OK, well that’s an old problem. Then the Post says, yeah, but we found cases of this happening hundreds of miles away from the border. OK, well I did a federal court records search and within half an hour turned up two cases like that from the Obama years, so that doesn’t prove anything new either. And they say State is now scrutinizing cases of babies delivered by South Texas doctor too, which is supposedly unprecedented. Once again, that scrutiny stems from the Obama years. If there is a “most serious” error in the piece, it’s the stuff regarding Dr. Jorge Treviño. In talking to one of the lawyers who worked on these cases, I find the Post referenced an Obama-era case to help support its claim of a Trump-era crackdown in the original piece without disclosing that the case dates from before Trump. That’s moving beyond the territory of a mistake -- that’s either dishonest or extremely sloppy reporting. Along with that, the Post included an allegation of fraud against the doctor based on an alleged affidavit that the Post hasn’t seen. I knew they hadn’t seen it because the lawyers told of its existence haven’t seen it and don’t believe the allegation from an unknown accuser is credible. When the doctor’s widow and daughter tried to contact the Post to rebut that fraud claim, the paper ignored them, which is highly unethical. The Post corrected those errors last week in response to our queries, but those are ethical problems. What do you want readers to take away? What are some lessons for people covering passport denials going forward? Is there any way to get a definitive answer on how much this is happening? It’s a complex problem. After talking to half a dozen lawyers who work these cases, including the two cited in the Post’s piece, I also suspect something might have changed. But you can see why the paper failed to prove it -- it’s a tough thing to prove. Individual lawyers handle too few cases to make a reasonable comparison to national statistics. The statistics we do have are incomplete -- they refer almost exclusively to suspect midwife cases from South Texas, but we know that the State Department casts scrutiny on all sorts of other cases. In addition to the lack of data, federal records in cases hinging on citizenship claims are often sealed at the request of the lawyers. Because of all that, I don’t expect a definitive answer to this question soon. If lawyers were to file another class-action lawsuit challenging this clearly unresolved problem, however, we might get clearer answers. ALSO The world's richest man came to Washington. It was gross. Hating on Obamacare is coming back to haunt a Republican candidate for governor. One Republican official challenged thousands of his fellow citizens' voting registrations. It was easy.
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