Noted snowflake melter and Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren might take issue with undocumented Americans, but as sweet, ironic fate would have it, Lahren might just have benefitted from an ancestor’s history as one.
Ending DACA: the radical notion illegal immigration isn't to be celebrated with sanctuary and perks. #DACA
— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) September 5, 2017
Hey Libs pulling out the DACA emotion card: explain to LEGAL immigrants why they had to follow the law but others are above it. #DACA
— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) September 5, 2017
According to a Wonkette piece by journalist and “avid genealogist” Jennifer Mendelsohn, Lahren’s great-great-great grandfather was prosecuted for forging his citizenship papers.
As Mendelsohn’s research found (which consisted of her following a combined internet and paper trail of Lahren’s lineage, and even ordering a 14-page court file of her alleged ancestor’s indictment), Constantin Dietrich, Lahren’s said ancestor from Russia, was charged with two separate immigration violations. One charge was for “forgery, in altering the date of his declaration,” and the other “willfully, unlawfully, and knowingly” making a false affidavit in connection with a naturalization proceeding:
“The grand jurors accused him of swearing falsely to the date of his declaration, and of altering the original papers (“with a knife or steel eraser or other instrument unknown to the Grand Jurors”) to make it look like his declaration of intention to become a citizen had been executed in 1911 rather than 1909, apparently because he’d let too much time elapse before completing the naturalization process.”
Despite the evidence brought against Dietrich, Mendelsohn wrote, the trial jury acquitted him of his charges. Thankfully for Lahren, her great-great-grandpa went onto become a citizen in 1926. And yet, according to Lahren precedent, she would have met her ancestor’s unlawful actions with a swift “bye!”
We are indeed a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Respect our laws and we welcome you. If not, bye. #DACA
— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) September 6, 2017
Mendelsohn wrote that her digging into Lahren’s past is her own form of “resistance genealogy”—a means of proving that Lahren and other immigration moral high-grounders such as Rep. Steve King, Stephen Miller, and Tucker Carlson all came from a line of immigrants whose actions allowed them to thrive as American citizens, but ultimately contradict their toxic, anti-immigrant sentiments.
Mendelsohn also notes that digging into anyone‘s genealogy is bound to bring up any possibility of irregularities, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Dietrich deserves to be demonized:
“Perhaps it only means that like millions of others, his overweening desire to become a US citizen may have caused him to try to cut a corner or two. It means he may have been a good man who made a bad decision under pressure. It means you’d hope his great-great-granddaughter would have empathy for the plight of immigrants rather than try to pull up the ladder behind her.”
Lahren did not immediately respond to an email from the Daily Dot for comment.
H/T Raw Story