Trump wants to send Native Americans to India, fake news story says

A fake news story contended that President Donald Trump conflated Native Americans with people actually from India, and wanted to deport them to the South Asian subcontinent.

"Trump wants to deport American Indians to India," read the headline on an April 25, 2017, post on ILoveNativeAmericans.us. The post was flagged by Facebook users as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social media site’s efforts to winnow fake news from users’ feeds.

ILoveNativeAmericans.us ostensibly is a site filled with stories about or of interest to Native Americans. But there’s evidence it’s a fake news outlet however, not the least of which is that the site insisted to a commenter questioning the story that "this is real, it was on TV."

We received no response when we tried to contact the administrator via the Gmail address the site provided. The site is registered to someone in Kosovo.

The story falsely quoted Trump in a bogus Fox News interview as saying, "I’ve seen it in all kinds of TV documentaries. Horrible attacks on good Americans using hatchets or bows and arrows. You can’t trust these Indians."

Also included are two images of tweets, allegedly from Feb. 13. The tweets are actually fakes. As all devoted PolitiFacters know, it’s quite easy to fake a tweet from any account, and Trump is a popular target. There’s no record of Trump actually tweeting such things about Native Americans.

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Moreover, the story itself came from a parody site called The-Postillon.com, which first posted the article on Feb. 13.

The-Postillon.com calls itself "honest news" on its banner, but its FAQ section notes that "everything you can read here is satire and therefore all made-up." Unlike many parody sites, the FAQ also lists several staffers, and gives readers explicit permission to repost edited articles with attribution. The site is registered in Roubaix, France.

The story has made it onto other suspect aggregators similar to I LoveNativeAmericans.us. One version appeared on WeLoveNative.com on Feb. 28, while it showed up (and was then removed) on NativeAmericans.news on March 4. Both websites also are registered to addresses in Kosovo.

There has been some concern that Trump’s immigration efforts may affect Indians in the United States — some 300,000 illegal immigrants are Indians, according to the Times of India. Possible changes in the H-1B temporary visa program also are likely to affect Indians here.

But Trump didn’t make these statements, and there’s no executive order deporting Native Americans to another country.

We rate the statement Pants On Fire!

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2017-04-26 19:32:00 UTC

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Pants on Fire

"Trump wants to deport American Indians to India."

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Tuesday, April 25, 2017

2017-04-25

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