Curbing illegal immigration was one of the pillars of Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign and is now a key component of his 2020 re-election effort.

That means you can expect to see a steady dose of headlines directed at what the liberal media believes are the horrors of deportation, even if it means obscuring the truth.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post published a story titled “At least 138 Salvadorans deported by the U.S. were killed in El Salvador: Rights group.”

However, that headline hid an important detail.

Of the 138 deported Salvadorans whose killings were reported, 109 of them were deported by the administration of former President Barack Obama.

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But, wouldn’t you know it, they did find a way to make it an anti-Trump piece when they quoted Human Rights Watch and its managing director, Alison Leal Parker, who said that the situation “will only worsen” under Trump.

She also blamed the United States for returning the deportees to their home countries.

“U.S. authorities knew or should have known they were going to return these people to harm,” she said. “Therefore they should not have done it.”

Conveniently, Human Rights Watch did not list the reasons for the deportations other than saying some lost asylum cases and others committed crimes.

The report said that many of the detainees were murdered by gangs, particularly MS13, when they returned home, which raises the question of why that would be the case.

There is no way to know from the report if any of the deportees were involved in gang activity, but traditionally gangs target rival gang members.

And as horrific as these murders are, do we really want to import an MS-13 gang war into the United States?

In 2012, there were around 5,600 asylum applications for Salvadorans, but as violence increased in their nation so did the applications, to more than 60,000 in 2017.

The murder rate has dropped significantly, to around 36 per 100,000 people, or 2,390 since 2015, The Post reported.

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“There are an estimated 1.2 million Salvadorans without American citizenship living in the United States,” it said. “Nearly 300,000 are permanent residents. An additional 195,000 have temporary protected status. From 2014 to 2018, about 18 percent of Salvadoran applicants were granted asylum.”

By The Post’s numbers, that means there are around 700,000 illegal Salvadorans in the United States — a frightening number, considering that MS 13 was founded as a Salvadoran gang.

But you are not supposed to be concerned about the safety and well-being of your family. That would make you a racist.

Instead, you are supposed to have your heartstrings tugged to the point where you will say OK to open borders.

It would be nice to save everyone, everywhere from the chaos and violence in the rest of the world, but bringing it to our nation would not make Americans safer.

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