All the things The Media Says About ICE Detentions Is A Lie

You might have guessed by now that most of what the national press reports about President Trump’s immigration crackdown and ICE detentions is either intentionally misleading, lacking context, incomplete, or outright false.

Take the latest media outrage over the arrest and detention of an Irishman named Seamus Culleton, a man who arrived in America 17 years ago, is married to an American citizen, lives in Boston, has work authorization and a pending Green Card application. Culleton came here legally in 2009 on a visa waiver program but overstayed the six-month limit. Surely he’s not the kind of person Trump claimed to be targeting violent criminal aliens, the “worst of the worst.” After all, the media said Culleton has no criminal record, and that he’s made a decent life for himself in America.

ICE arrested Culleton five months ago, and he’s been in federal custody in Texas ever since. He recently called an Irish radio station from ICE detention to complain about the conditions, saying the facility was “like a concentration camp, absolute hell.” He also asked the Irish prime minister to intervene in his case, which is how the U.S. media picked up on his story and ran with it — a just-so story that seemed to disprove the Trump administration’s repeated claim that ICE is only going after “the worst of the worst.”

A flurry of sympathetic stories about Culleton swiftly followed. But most failed to mention, or buried, that Culleton was facing drug charges in Ireland at the time he moved to the United States, and that an arrest warrant was issued for him by Irish authorities shortly after he arrived in the U.S. in 2009.

An article about Culleton this week in the libertarian outlet Reason made no mention of this. A CBS News story about him that ran Wednesday only mentioned the drug charges in Ireland nine paragraphs into the piece. Buried even deeper in the article is the news that Culleton had full due process, was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge in September, and that ICE offered him the chance to go back to Ireland immediately but he chose to remain in ICE custody.

So instead of straight reporting on the most salient facts about this case — a foreign national fled criminal drug charges in his home country, overstayed his visa, and was ordered deported by an immigration judge — we get a juiced-up sob story about an upstanding Irishman who just wanted to be a good American.

The Culleton case is just another example of how the media treats immigration stories under Trump. ICE is always bad, hapless immigrants who get snatched off the streets — or “kidnapped” and jailed with “no due process” — are always good. But when you take two minutes and look into these cases, most of the time it turns out the illegal alien has a warrant, or a prior conviction, or a final order of removal from an immigration judge, or — as in Culleton’s case — has pending criminal charges in their home country.

This week we’ve been relentlessly subjected to a disingenuous media talking point that less than 14 percent of those arrested by ICE during Trump’s first year back in office had violent criminal records. “The internal DHS figures undermine frequent assertions by the Trump administration that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting dangerous and violent criminals living in the U.S. illegally,” reported CBS News earlier this week. The claim was repeated across every major news outlet, presented as proof that the Trump administration has been lying about immigration enforcement, and that ICE is just rounding up hardworking immigrants whose only crime was coming here without documentation.

Then along comes Culleton, and it seems the perfect story to illustrate the 14 percent statistic. And in a narrow sense perhaps it does. Culleton after all doesn’t have charges or convictions for any violent crimes.

But therein lies the distortion and dissimulation. The media’s talking point about the share of violent criminal aliens arrested last year fails to include people charged or convicted for crimes like drug trafficking, human trafficking, theft, and a whole host of other charges, any one of which should get a foreign national immediately deported.

The Trump administration has said, accurately, that nearly 70 percent of the 400,000 illegals arrested last year have some kind of criminal charges or convictions. That’s a pretty high share of the total, especially when you consider that when ICE arrests a criminal alien, if there are other illegal aliens with that person (like a spouse or children or relatives), ICE takes them into custody too — even if they aren’t considered a criminal alien.

And that happens all the time, in part because some 10 million illegal aliens were released into the country under Biden, which means the already vast illegal immigrant underground in the U.S. grew exponentially from 2020 to 2025. The Biden administration had no idea who these people were because there was no way to vet the sheer volume of people being released. Most of them were likely economic migrants just looking to get into the U.S. and start working. But among those 10 million there were untold thousands of criminals who were wanted or convicted of crimes here in the U.S. or in their home country.

Consider that Culleton, the Irishman, came here in 2009, long before the current immigration crisis kicked off, and did so specifically, it seems, to run from drug charges back home. Imagine how many more people like that there were among the millions of illegals who were released into the country under Biden.

Those are the people ICE is trying to round up and deport right now. They are also the people the media will to lie to you about, to your face, over and over, no matter what.