President Joe Biden on Tuesday nominated Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, of Harris County, Texas, to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security.
Gonzalez has served the Houston community as sheriff since his election in 2016. He was one of the sheriff’s nationally who refused to cooperate with the Trump administration’s plans to enlist municipalities to deport immigrants who were in the country illegally.
The New York Post temporarily deleted, and then edited and republished, a debunked article that falsely claimed that copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’ book were being included in “welcome kits” given to migrant children at a shelter in Long Beach, California.
The reporter who wrote the article, Laura Italiano, tweeted late Tuesday afternoon that she had resigned from the newspaper. Italiano tweeted: “The Kamala Harris story — an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against — was my breaking point.”
The Post newsroom referred questions about Italiano to a public relations representative, who did not immediately respond to a request for a response to Italiano’s accusation that she had been “ordered” to write the article.
The Post’s major revisions to the article earlier on Tuesday came after the inaccuracies had already spread widely in conservative circles — and prompted baseless accusations that Harris, whom President Joe Biden has assigned to lead the effort to stem the flow of migrants to the southern border, was personally profiting from the immigration situation.
The Post’s Tuesday changes to the article, which was originally published on Friday, followed a Washington Post fact check in which a Long Beach spokesman explained that a community member had donated a single copy of the Harris children’s book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” as part of a book drive — and that the book would not be handed out in a welcome kits.
The spokesman, Kevin Lee, told the Washington Post and later CNN that neither the federal government nor the city government had purchased copies of the Harris book. Lee told CNN in an email that books will be made available at the shelter in an informal library, not pre-selected for each child’s welcome package.