Telling likely voters to vote for your candidacy is drastically different than telling people Climate Change is a Chinese hoax or that thousands of men, woman, and children seeking asylum are terrorists.
But it’s also false to claim most are women and children and that most are fleeing violence (most are men seeking economic sdvantage) and that entering illegally deserves as much rights as people who’ve applied legally and have waited decades.
It’s also false to insinuate the Obama admin didn’t use teargas against wannabe border crossers. And it’s also false to insinuate it’s illegal. France, just the other day had suppressed a demo against taxes in Paris using teargas but no one’s outraged at that. Teargas is used as crowd control in many euro countries.
I'm generally pro-immigration, but you're right and make valid points. I'm a UK citizen but we face similar problems in nature if not magnitude. My position is that controlled, proportionate immigration is good for the country (UK, but generally too) both culturally and economically and should follow legal due process.
My main criticizm of the Trump administration's handling of the situation, as an outside observer, is that they are persistently and maliciously bypassing due process (muslim ban imposed arbitrarily even on legal residents while people were in the air, separating children from their parents, etc). Frustration and revulsion at these actions naturally throws a sharp spotlight on whatever else the administration does with regard to immigration, and rightly so. As I said, you're probably right on those incidents, but it's also fair to say that the degree to which a tactic is used also matters, and they deserve every single bit of enhanced scrutiny they face on this issue.
Or see the 70s and 80s and South America, or our reasoning for invading Iraq in the 2000s, or the 1960s and Vietnam. Or the 1953 coup d'etat against Iran because BP was going to lose their investments. And, and, and....
The answer isn't trying to create another hegemon of "real" news, like it was in the good old days of monoculture. The answer really is in what the person above said, people have to be more discerning. Also, the problem really isn't "new" because it really wasn't 'better' in the past -- just invisible to most of the people who are wringing their hands about this in 2018.