The writer whose magazine article Ann Coulter cited as evidence that immigrant children being separated from their parents at the US border are "child actors" says she misrepresented his writing.

"Either she lied or she's truly illiterate," Suketu Mehta told BuzzFeed News.



On Fox News this Sunday, Coulter disparaged asylum-seekers caught up in the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy as "child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now." She claimed a New Yorker magazine article had described how "these kids are being coached" and said the children are "given scripts to read by liberals."

After some journalists on Twitter challenged her to produce the New Yorker article that made any such claims, Coulter tweeted a link to Mehta's 2011 profile of an African woman seeking asylum in the United States.

"I was really shocked to see she is using my New Yorker piece, which has no child actors, no liberals toting scripts to be read by child actors," said Mehta, a New York University professor and author of an upcoming book about immigration.

"I don't know if she knows how to read, but she clearly hasn't read my New Yorker article."

