NBC’s False ICE Story Shows How Media Lies Put Lives at Risk

NBC News was forced this week to walk back one of the ugliest smears I’ve seen in a long time, a story accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents of “holding a 5-year-old autistic girl captive” to pressure her illegal immigrant father into surrendering.

That headline traveled fast. It fit the narrative the media loves: faceless, cruel ICE agents tearing families apart. But the truth was the exact opposite.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the father, Edward Hip Mejia, wasn’t some helpless victim. He was a man with prior arrests for domestic abuse. When agents tried to pull him over, he ignored their emergency lights, sped back to his home, flipped agents “the double middle finger,” and then abandoned his 5-year-old daughter in the car before darting into his house.

Agents didn’t use the girl as a pawn. They rescued her. They called local police to report the abandonment.

That’s a detail NBC conveniently left out until DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin publicly corrected the record:

“He fled from the car, gave officers the double middle finger, and darted inside his house. He abandoned his 5-year-old daughter in the car. Officers helped rescue the child.”

So NBC changed its headline. What once read, “ICE held 5-year-old autistic girl…to pressure father to surrender” now reads, “Video shows ICE with 5-year-old girl while agents attempt to arrest her father.” Buried at the bottom is a quiet correction: “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the activities of ICE agents.”

Translation: they smeared law enforcement with a lie, then quietly updated after the damage was already done.

This would be bad enough if it were just sloppy journalism. But it’s worse than that. These false stories are pouring gasoline on a fire that’s already burning.

Just this week, a shooter attacked an ICE facility in Dallas. He killed two detainees and injured another. On the shell casings, authorities found engravings with anti-ICE slogans. DHS is warning of a “1,000% increase in assaults against our brave law enforcement,” and it’s not hard to see why.

When Democrats compare ICE to the Gestapo, when activists scream about “concentration camps,” and when outlets like NBC publish smears about agents kidnapping autistic children, you create an environment where unhinged radicals feel justified in violence.

McLaughlin said it clearly:

“Disgusting smears like these peddled by the media are leading to a 1000% increase in assaults against our brave law enforcement.”

And yet, even after a wave of left-wing violence — Charlie Kirk assassinated, attempted Trump assassinations, and now ICE agents literally under fire — the media’s instinct is to protect the narrative, not the truth.

This is the same media that will lecture us endlessly about “misinformation.” But here’s the real misinformation: they tell us ICE agents are monsters, when the reality is they’re the ones cleaning up the mess after criminal illegals abandon their kids.

NBC’s correction doesn’t fix the larger problem: a press corps that thinks every story has to be bent into a weapon against conservatives, against Trump, against law enforcement. And in doing so, they make America less safe.