The press is having a field day exploiting children to attack President Trump and his effort to re-establish rule of law in immigration.

Tossing all previous compunction about showing a child's face on national television out the window, they put the cameras right in a little girl's face to get her to talk and cry about a recent immigration raid in Mississippi. No blue dot for her over this little girl's face, they went full frontal instead, as if a child that young were capable of giving consent. Now the video will follow the girl all her life, and will likely end up a topic for mocking memes, something no 11 year-old deserves. Not a problem for the big-buck press, though, such as CBS, which in fact, does this a lot. Here's what CBS cooked up:

11-year-old girl tearfully pleads for dad's release after massive ICE raid https://t.co/fYINl8Sh0q pic.twitter.com/rRG2ioSC2r

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 9, 2019

It's child exploitation, nothing less, an overriding bid to push a narrative, to force an emotional reaction. It might not have been the only time the little girl has been exploited, either. She might have been hauled over the border herself on a child-abuse-level journey as a chit for her parents avoiding immigration detention. She might have not even been related to the man she calls her father, the press didn't ask, though the problem has become widespread. The child could have been brought into existence as an anchor baby in her parents' bid to game the immigration system, reducing their odds of deportation. And for sure she was exploited by activists who put her in front of the CBS cameras to cry for the press. 

It's outrageous, a nasty new frontier in child exploitation by the press to promote a narrative. By this logic, the report suggests that all immigration enforcement needs to be suspended based on the cryings of children. This is the new standard -- Open Borders, zero enforcement, surge away -- to tug on the heartstrings and keep kids from crying.

I'm not indifferent to the child's human suffering. In the aughts, I remember a sweet little three year-old daughter of a friend, and her terrible suffering when her parents split apart in a divorce. When I was four and growing up in California in the '60s, I remember my father going away for long periods of time to Florida (to prepare to send a man to the moon) and being intensely distressed by his absence which felt like an eternity. It's always a catastrophe for a little one when a father disappears.

I was separated from my father because of the Apollo program. So are the children whose parents are mobilized to serve in U.S. wars and missions abroad. And in a sort of equality of feeling, so are children whose parents are imprisoned for selling drugs, plotting terrorism, cheating on taxes, or robbing banks. Children suffer when they are separated from their parents.

So should the Apollo program have been suspended based on my child's tears? Should every service member be allowed to go AWOL based on their children's tears? And should every law against crime be suspended based on the perpetrators's children's tears?

 Kids whose parents have been killed by illegal immigrants also suffer from separation from their parents. Will we see CBS running footage of those kids's tears, too? Not at all. Doing that might lead to the conclusion that illegal immigration, too, needs to be suspended. To CBS, those kids' tears, therefore, don't count. Only the sufferings of the children of illegal immigrants who have been arrested based on their parents' actions get the child-exploitation news slot.

The little girl in the video's tears are no justification for ending enforcement of illegal immigration, which, by the way, is pretty paltry. (Most of the people busted in the raids have been let out with a court date they'll ignore based on being pregnant, being gravely ill and in need of free medical care, or sure enough, having kids here.) Either we have law at the border or we don't, and already, voters have spoken. Most Latino and Black voters, based on a recent poll, support rule of law in immigration, perhaps they were CBS's target. 

Whatever you want to call it, videos like these of children crying are not hard news. They are propaganda, tug-at-the-heartstrings efforts to manipulate in a bid to keep borders open and avoid hard questions. CBS has done it before, too - with their now-discredited photo of a crying child of a border surger supposedly separated from her mother (turns out she wasn't), and then another sad picture of a father with a child who refused to wait in the asylum line and instead drowned trying to enter the U.S. illegally with a child across a raging river. This use of the emotion template for propaganda purposes represents a repulsive slide in news ethics. When the only agenda is to thwart President Trump and keep the borders open for the benefit of Democrats, any question of exploitation of children becomes secondary. For CBS, the end justifies the means.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot