While there’s been an awful lot of reporting about the crackdown on illegal immigration in this country since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, there’s also been an awful lot of misreporting on the who, what, when, where, and how of the operations the feds are conducting.
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Even more disturbingly, a George Soros-funded radio station in California (KCBS Radio 740 AM) has also been caught allegedly broadcasting the locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and their vehicles. The station is now under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on grounds that the station’s actions might not have been “consistent with their public interest obligations” as outlined in their FCC license.
SEE ALSO: Are Illegal Immigrants Being Tipped Off to ICE Raids?
Relatedly, Denver NBC News affiliate 9News is in the hot seat this week after a sensationalistic report they ran on a man who they originally said had no criminal history at the time he was picked up by ICE.
Screengrabs show the original headline was “Man without criminal history detained by ICE on his way to work,” and the story gave readers the impression that random folks were being yanked off the street by ICE for no reason other than (perhaps) the fact that they looked Hispanic.
The story has since been updated with a new headline (“Man says ICE agents asked about a neighbor, then took him into custody”) after the Denver ICE division put them on blast on social media, alerting the outlet that the man did in fact have a criminal history:
Denver News Station @9NEWS wrote a sympathetic story claiming that a migrant without a criminal history was randomly questioned and detained by ICE on his way to work.
ICE has now confirmed that the man pled guilty to his second DUI just a few weeks ago. pic.twitter.com/pZ7i2WomaD
— AG (@AGHamilton29) February 12, 2025
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ICE Denver calls out a local TV station which claimed one of their targets had no criminal history and was just waiting to go to work when he got scooped up.
ICE counters by saying he has multiple DUIs, including last month, and has crossed into the US illegally at least 3x. https://t.co/EAQ0fRPc1f
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 12, 2025
In their updated story, 9News shared this excuse for why their initial report was wrong:
According to Colorado judicial records, Victor Manuel pleaded guilty to DUI on Jan. 24, 2025. Court records indicate the federal government and state judicial spelled his last name two different ways which led 9NEWS to the incorrect conclusion that he had no criminal record. In addition, 9NEWS reached out to a spokesperson for ICE at 10:56 a.m. Tuesday seeking information on any criminal history. That response went unanswered until 2:42 p.m. Wednesday, when ICE posted on X that the man did have a criminal history.
Mindblowing. I mean they admit they reached out to ICE for comment regarding any possible record of criminal history and didn’t get it before publication, and yet ran the story with definitive declarations about Manuel instead of adding the necessary qualifiers to it, like “family says detained man has no criminal history” or something along those lines, which lets the reader know that the criminal history is an open question the outlet is working to verify.
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What makes this even worse is that checking the URL for the story at web.archive.org gives you the following message: “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” Wayback Machine doesn’t just do that on its own. Someone has to send them an email request to exclude it. My bet is 9News did this so the original version couldn’t be found.
I don’t care how many corrections they make to the story nor how much they try to rabbit hole their original claims, but this is just a terrible look for 9News, which has escalated already-high tensions all because they chose to sensationalize a local story – unnecessarily generating more fear and confusion in the process – over waiting for all the facts.
