T. BECKET ADAMS: Have media forgotten what it means to be ‘sympathetic?’
The New York Times recently published what is clearly meant to be a tear-jerker, highlighting the supposed human cost of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Except that the paper of record tried to portray as a sympathetic character an illegal immigrant who killed a man. Amazingly, it doesn’t end there. Romeo Perez-Bravo has additional victims, including those who’ve suffered the consequences of his theft, drunk driving, and repeated illegal border crossings.
One such victim is American-born Dan Kluver, whose identity Perez-Bravo stole around 2009. Since then, the real Kluver has had to pay thousands of dollars in mistakenly assigned IRS fees. His wages have been garnished. Kluver has spent hundreds of hours trying to convince the IRS that the man they really want is the illegal immigrant who stole his identity. It gets worse. False charges of tax evasion are just the beginning.
The real Dan Kluver has also been sued in a wrongful-death lawsuit after Perez-Bravo struck and killed a 68-year-old American-born man in a vehicle accident. Perez-Bravo was “cleared of any wrongdoing” in the man’s death, according to the New York Times, but that’s no comfort for Kluver, whose name and identity are now forever linked to an accidental death in which he had no part.
If you need more proof that Perez-Bravo is a bad person, beyond the episode in which he refused to give up his stolen identity even after he killed a man, it’s worth noting that since first crossing illegally into the United States as a teenager, he has accumulated a “string of DUI convictions.” He was also deported in 2005, 2008, and 2009. Each time, he illegally crossed back into the U.S. and stole a different citizen’s identity. Perez-Bravo has since been arrested and charged with aggravated identity theft and false representation of a Social Security number. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison to be followed by deportation (again) to Guatemala.
Perez-Bravo is not a good person. He’s the antonym of “sympathetic.”
Yet, in its coverage of Kluver and the man who has made his life a living hell, this is what the Times chose as its headline: “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.”
The subhead is even worse: “Thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent Social Security numbers. One of them belonged to Dan Kluver.” The story itself refers to identity theft as “a survival tactic used to pass background checks and get jobs.”
Surely, the New York Times is aware that identity theft isn’t like cancer or a wildfire caused by lightning, or some other random event. It involves agency, free will, and premeditated criminal intent. Yet its writers and editors seem to think you can slip on a banana peel and, by pure chance, end up using someone else’s Social Security number. Even more ridiculous is that Times staffers evidently believe that identity theft is a victimless crime, just a little bit of harmless truth-bending. Tell that to Kluver.
As the classic Babylon Bee headline from 2019 noted:
I assume this sort of moral equivalence is designed to keep the Grady Lady’s subscriber base happy (and thus not reaching for their pitchforks), which speaks volumes about the left’s collective mindset in 2025.
